XIV The Cromwellian Regime, 1650–60

In England, Cromwell made repeated and varied but unsuccessful attempts to reconcile his commitment to the ‘rule of the saints’ with his hankering after a return to a constitutional regime acceptable to the ‘political nation’. He was forced from one expedient to another, and when he died he was worn out and prematurely aged. His government was a dictatorship depending ultimately on military force, and there was no one fit to succeed him. The Irish executive was influenced by the problems and factions of both England and Ireland, but the manner in which the war had been fought and won had made it certain that far-reaching changes would be harshly and rigorously imposed on the country.

Cromwell had come to Ireland as lord lieutenant and commander-in-chief. When he left on 26 May 1650 his power was delegated to Ireton as lord deputy and army commander. The first step towards setting up a civil administration was taken on 4 October 1650, with the appointment of four ‘commissioners of parliament’, Edmund Ludlow, Miles Corbet, and John Jones, all three of them regicides, and John Weaver, who had been appointed a judge for the king's trial, but had not acted.¹ Ludlow was a difficult, unbending character, with political views that became much more radical than Cromwell's, and there was a suggestion that he had been sent to Ireland to have him out of the way. After the death of Ireton, he was provisionally appointed commander-in-chief by his fellow commissioners on 2 December 1651, being the only one of the four with the requisite military experience, and he commanded the army until the war ended the following year. While it continued, the commissioners could only take preliminary steps towards a system of civil government. They divided the country into six precincts, later increased to fifteen, and finally stabilised at twelve. Each was under a military governor, and for some time officials called ‘commissioners of revenue’ performed all the civil functions.

Cromwell's commission as commander-in-chief expired in July 1652, and Charles Fleetwood was appointed acting commander-in-chief and a parliamentary principal commissioner of government on 9 July. He had married Ireton's widow, Cromwell's daughter Bridget. Ludlow resented the appointment and was not mollified when Fleetwood, a man of flexible and accommodating temperament, not merely tolerated but encouraged the baptists and other sectaries, though he himself was an independent.¹ He arrived in Ireland about 10 September, with a daunting set of instructions directing him to settle the country in accordance with the recent enactment, to raise a monthly revenue of £40,000, to promulgate ‘the gospel and the power of true religion and holiness’, and to see that the laws of England be put into execution in Ireland, ‘as near as the present affairs will permit’.²

A union of the two islands was signalised on 2 March 1653, when the ‘Rump parliament’ voted that henceforth Ireland be represented by thirty members in the new house of 460. The Rump was dissolved on 20 April, but six Irish members sat in the nominated or ‘Barebones’ parliament when it opened on 4 July. When this in turn was forced by the army to surrender its powers to Cromwell, and he was named lord protector on 16 December 1653, the ‘instrument of government’ confirmed the Irish representation of thirty members in parliament, which was to sit for at least five months every third year. Ireland was represented in this way in the British parliaments of 1654, 1656, and 1659. Elections were held, but government influence normally succeeded in securing the returns required. Parliament, of course, was only one of several factors the lord protector had to keep in balance in order to maintain the state: in particular, the factor of military intervention had always to be considered. The demand that Ireland should have a separate parliament began to revive, principally because legislation was not enacted to bring about the free trade that should have resulted from the parliamentary union.³ In consequence, it was easy to revert to the old state of affairs after the restoration, all the more as Ireland had kept its separate executive, and this soon settled into a form scarcely distinguishable from the traditional one.

The proclamation of Oliver Cromwell as lord protector was made in Dublin on 30 January 1654. It led to much dissatisfaction among the more radical element in the army. Fleetwood shared their misgivings at what seemed a strange ending to demands for popular sovereignty, but in July he was appointed lord deputy and in August a council of state of six was appointed to assist and advise him: Miles Corbet (one of the original 1650 commissioners), Robert Goodwin, Robert Hammond, Richard Pepys, William Steele, and Matthew Tomlinson. All in all, they had a much less radical complexion than the commissioners originally named in 1650.

Cromwell for his part had his own misgivings that Fleetwood might be too accommodating towards the army radicals. His own son, Henry, had been named to the Irish council of state in August, but the protector did not acquiesce in this appointment, being for a complexity of reasons reluctant to countenance the emergence of what could be objected to as dynastic power. Before the end of the year, however, he had changed his mind. On 25 December Henry Cromwell was nominated to the Irish council. The other members now were Corbet, Goodwin, Pepys, and Tomlinson. Steele did not act as a member of the council till he came to Ireland in September 1656 on being appointed lord chancellor, and Hammond had died in October 1654. Henry Cromwell did not arrive in Ireland until July 1655, but he achieved effective even if limited control when Fleetwood, though remaining lord deputy, was forced to return to England on 6 September.

This was a further step towards reducing the influence of the more radical faction. Ludlow, displaced as lieutenant general in August 1652, had steadily refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the protectorate, and to the best of his ability had worked actively against it. One of Fleetwood's last acts had been to give him leave to go to England to argue his case with the protector. Henry Cromwell would have preferred to keep him in Ireland, but he was insistent, and after the indignity of a six weeks’ detention at Beaumaris he and the lord protector did have some frank exchanges. They produced no effect, but he was allowed to live in England quietly, though unrepentant, and powerless until the downfall of the protectorate.

When Henry Cromwell arrived in Ireland the baptist sectaries were in control of the administration. By 1659 he had displaced not merely these but also the independents, and had instead forged a politique alliance with the ‘old protestants’, as the protestant planters who had settled in Ireland before 1641 came to be known after the restoration. These had succeeded, after some anxieties and uncertainties, in retaining their property and even in adding to it.¹ Indications multiplied that ‘revolutionary government’ was being displaced by a closer association between economic strength and political power. In 1655 and 1656 the local government and judicial systems were restored. In this process, the ‘old protestants’ emerged in some strength. The 1656 parliamentary elections returned such members as Lord Broghill, Sir Charles Coote, and Vincent Gookin. Many government officials, including more than half the twenty-one sheriffs appointed in 1656, had been in Ireland before 1641. The somewhat puzzling and ineffective act for convicting popish recusants, imposing an oath of abjuration of the distinctive tenets of popery, passed in this parliament, may be an indication of fears that the ‘protestant interest’, in seeking to define itself, might have to take some cognisance of the existence of the papists.²

On 4 August 1656 William Bury was nominated to the council of state. The appointment of this ‘religious and prudent gentleman’, a strong presbyterian, was certainly intended to strengthen Henry Cromwell's position against the radical faction. Though he was removed from office when the Irish administration was once again transferred to commissioners of parliament in May 1659, he remained in the country and worked actively with Coote and Broghill in preparing for the restoration.

Fleetwood was succeeded as lord deputy by Henry Cromwell on 17 November 1657. The lord protector died on 3 September 1658. His ineffective son Richard was named his successor, and the protectorate began to disintegrate. Even under Oliver, its structure had become increasingly rickety, due primarily, it must be noted with some irony, to chronic financial difficulties that could be remedied only by a vote of supplies that parliament was unwilling to give. Although Henry Cromwell was named lord lieutenant of Ireland on 6 October 1658, this had little significance as power slipped from his brother's hands in England. On 6 May 1659 the army forced Richard to recall the Rump parliament and on 24 May he formally resigned the protectorate. A demand for the recall of the excluded members—they finally returned on 21 February 1660—made the restoration of Charles II inevitable. On 7 May 1659 parliament once again named five commissioners for Ireland (Ludlow now being commander-in-chief): Corbet, Goodwin, Jones, Steele, and Tomlinson. Henry Cromwell left on 27 June. Over this period, however, the forms of government mattered less than the struggle for position and power, of necessity tortuous as long as the restoration remained a great imponderable.

In England, the question whether the country should recall the king or have a successor to Oliver Cromwell in the person of General John Lambert, representing the independent faction of the army, was resolved by the decision of General George Monck not to support Lambert but to call for a free parliament. Indeed, Monck did not so much take the initiative as allow public opinion to express itself. In Ireland, Monck's party staged a coup d’état in December that gave them control of the army. The leading figures were of ‘old protestant’ stock—Broghill, Coote, Theophilus Jones, and Hardress Waller. A convention, controlled by the politiques, among whom the ‘old protestants’ were dominant, opened in Dublin on 7 February 1660. In defence of their interests, now threatened by loyalists, catholic as well as protestant, returning with the king from exile, they asserted Irish legislative independence in terms that recalled the arguments of the catholic lawyers in the 1641 parliament and during the confederacy. They had no guarantee of their position when Charles II was proclaimed king in Dublin on 14 May, but their fears proved to be unfounded, because he was no more able to rule Ireland without their support and cooperation than Henry Cromwell had been.¹

Contemporary catholic writers described the state of the country after the Cromwellian conquest in apocalyptic terms: in the succinct phrase of one of the poets, it had been an cogadh do chríochnaigh Éire (the war that finished Ireland).¹ This was not too far from the truth. Especially in the later stages of the war, the armies of parliament had deliberately laid waste the land as a military tactic. Already in November 1650 Ireton reported that in stretches of thirty miles he had seen no life but only ruin and desolation. By the end of the war tillage had almost ceased and even livestock had to be imported. In June 1653 ‘the small number of inhabitants now remaining in County Clare’ told the commissioners that of its nine baronies containing 1,300 ploughlands only thirty ploughlands in the barony of Bunratty were inhabited, ‘except some few persons who for their own safety live in garrisons’.² Some modern critics would suggest that Petty's estimate of the population in 1652—a total of 850,000, of whom 160,000 were protestants—may be too low, perhaps by a factor of 40 per cent. His further estimate that 616,000 had perished since 1641 is reached by an even more oblique calculation, but it is the best we have.³

Inevitably, it was the poor who suffered most from the hunger, disease, and widespread misery: ‘some found feeding on carrion and weeds, some starved in the highways, and many times poor children, who have lost their parents or deserted by them, are found exposed to, and some of them fed upon by ravening wolves and other beasts of prey’. The country was ‘almost a blank sheet on which the English commonwealth could write what it wished’.⁴ The commonwealth's wishes appeared in the act for the settling of Ireland of 12 August 1652.⁵

The preamble of the act stated that it was not the intention of parliament to extirpate ‘the entire nation’, but that pardon as to life and estate would be granted to ‘the inferior sort’, and that those of rank and quality would be treated according to their ‘respective demerits’. Five groups were exempted from pardon for life or estate: all who before the first general assembly at Kilkenny had abetted the ‘rebellion, murders or massacres’; all Jesuits and priests involved in any way in the rebellion; 105 named magnates, headed by the earl of Ormond; all who had been guilty of the murder of civilians; and all who refused to lay down their arms within twenty-eight days. All officers who had fought against parliament were to be banished, but their wives and children were to be assigned the equivalent of one-third of their forfeited estates wherever parliament might decide. All others who had fought in the war were to forfeit their estates in return for the same compensation. All papists who had not shown ‘constant good affection’ to parliament were to be compensated by the equivalent of two-thirds of their estates, to be allotted where parliament might decide. All others who had not manifested ‘good affection’ were to surrender one-fifth, but to retain possession of the remainder (by an ordinance of 2 September 1654 these were allowed to compound for a fine, which, except for a few Ulster Scots, they never paid). As promised in the preamble the ‘inferior sort’ were granted full pardon on submission.

This draconian legislation thus came to be directed almost exclusively against catholics, and was so framed that no person of any property could hope to escape.¹ Under the first clause alone it has been estimated that 80,000 people were liable to the death penalty—probably half the adult males.² This was the retribution planned for ‘blood-guilt’. The fact that no serious attempt was made to give effect to it confirms the conviction that while the emotional drive behind the land confiscation was a device to punish a people believed to be collectively guilty, there was a hard economic motive making it necessary to confiscate most of Ireland, and it can be stated quite simply: nothing less would satisfy the debts parliament had pledged against Irish land.

To try those guilty of murder, a high court of justice was established in October 1652. The partial records of its proceedings available in print indicate that the court's sessions, held in a number of provincial centres as well as Dublin, were designed rather as an instrument of political intimidation rather than as a serious attempt to deal judicially with the vast numbers who might have been charged.³ Two cases might be singled out. One was that of the ‘arch-rebel’, Sir Phelim O'Neill, captured on 4 February 1653. He was tried, found guilty, and executed, but he might well have saved his life had he not continued to deny that he had received a commission to take arms from Charles I. The other is that of Edmund O'Reilly, catholic vicar general of Dublin. He was condemned to death, on not very satisfactory evidence, but after twenty-one months in prison he was banished to the Continent. One can only speculate why, but there are indications that his commitment to the cause of Owen Roe O'Neill had led him to do some service for Colonel Michael Jones at the time of the battle of Rathmines, and it is possible that he was protected by one of the colonel's two surviving brothers.¹

How many were executed we do not know, but they were at most hundreds, not thousands, and by the end of 1654 the court's activities seem to have come to an end. This failure to carry out the most draconian provision of the act of 1652 complicated the land settlement, in that many persons exempted from all pardon, even some of those exempted by name, received lands in Connacht, and the land available could not meet the demands on it.

The demands on the land of Ireland had begun with the adventurers’ act of March 1642.² This had allotted 2,500,000 acres in return for subscriptions of £1,000,000; the fact that the land was to be allotted in the four provinces indicates that already by February 1642 parliament had accepted, on what must then have been slender evidence, that all the Irish were guilty. The response was not up to expectations, even though further ordinances provided for a double allotment in ‘Irish’ acres measured at 21 feet to the perch in return for an addition of a quarter to the original subscription. Nevertheless, i, 533 in all subscribed £306,718, a sum exceeded among contemporary joint-stock ventures only by the East India company. The ‘adventurers’ had a strong urban and merchant element, especially from London, and many sold their bonds as the years went by, being very conscious that their money was earning no interest and having little personal inclination to become landlords in Ireland.

In 1643 one of these additional ordinances had allowed soldiers serving parliament in Ireland to receive their pay in Irish lands at the ‘act rates’, that is to say on the same terms as the adventurers. It is uncertain how and when this option became an obligation, as it is uncertain how and when it was extended to cover other arrears of pay.³ Between 1642 and 1649 very little money had been sent to Ireland to pay the parliamentary armies, and arrears had soared. When it came to a settlement, about 35,000 men had claims, first for service in Ireland since Cromwell's appointment as commander-in-chief on 30 March 1649, second for previous service in England (the ‘English arrears’), and third, for previous service in Ireland (the ‘1649 arrears’). Finally, by an act of 18 October 1644, parliament had accepted responsibility for the Irish war as a charge on the English public finances. It was assumed that this would be discharged from Irish land, ‘the great capital out of which all debts were paid, all services rewarded, and all acts of bounty performed’.⁴

What was clear was that an immense amount of land would be required, though how much could only be conjectured. The adventurers had the prior claim, and the sum they subscribed was known exactly, as was the quantity of land required to discharge it. How much money was due to the soldiers could to some degree be only conjectured. The estimate adopted, £1,750,000, was possibly on the low side, but to discharge it at ‘act rates’ would clearly demand very widespread confiscation indeed. The claims of the state were even harder to determine exactly. Between 1642 and 1649 at least £500,000 had been sent sporadically from England to Ireland. The Cromwellian conquest had cost about £3,500,000. Of this, over £2,000,000 had been raised in England, the remainder coming from Irish taxation, leaving a debt of over £2,500,000 to be discharged.

The act of settlement of 1652, as has been seen, envisaged an almost universal confiscation of land held by catholics. It was clear that nothing less would meet the debt. The confiscation was confined to catholics: proposals in 1653 to transplant the Ulster Scots to allotments in Munster petered out as an accommodation was gradually reached between the Scots and parliament.¹

As soon as the conquest was effectively over in 1652 pressure mounted to carry out this vast social upheaval quickly. It became possible to disband some of the army and the state's financial position urged that this be done as quickly as was compatible with safety. But the army could not be allotted land without settling the prior claims of the adventurers. Yet no one knew how much land was available for confiscation, or indeed how much land Ireland contained, for the only reliable survey hitherto attempted was that made by Strafford for Connacht and some adjoining areas. Rapid and accurate surveys were required. They could not be easily drawn up in a country so wasted as Ireland.

On 22 June 1653 an order authorised the taking of three surveys: a survey by inquisition from juries; a survey by measurement and mapping; and a ‘gross survey’. This last, which could be little more than a survey by guesswork, was to be attempted first. It began with the counties at that time allotted to the soldiers and adventurers,² and was completed for these by the end of the year. It was then extended to other confiscated lands. Only a fragment of this survey has come to light,³ but there were complaints of serious inaccuracies, as was indeed only to be expected. On 14 April 1654 orders were given for a ‘civil survey’ to be made by inquisitions taken from juries of ‘the most ancient and able inhabitants’. It was carried through quickly, and provided a much more reliable estimate, but still in the nature of things only an estimate, and in fact a serious underestimate, of the land available.¹ At the end of 1654 William Petty signed an agreement to begin the survey by measurement and mapping, the ‘down survey’.² His first contract was for the soldiers’ lands, where the problem was most urgent. Two years later his contract was extended, this time in conjunction with the surveyor general, to all confiscated lands. This portion went more slowly, partly because of bad relations between Petty and the surveyor general, partly because the adventurers did not welcome the survey, and it was not completed until 1659. While Petty's remarkable work was in advance of anything hitherto done in surveying and map-making, even he underestimated by between 10 and 15 per cent.

The history of these three surveys will give some idea of the basic confusion made inevitable in the Cromwellian settlement by the fact that land had to be allotted before it had been surveyed. To keep some path through this confusion, and to try to decide, in the light of the surviving records, what actually happened, it is proposed to deal first with the clearance of the Irish catholics and their settlement in Connacht, and then with the plantation of the confiscated lands.

On surrender, the Irish soldiers were normally allowed to go abroad. As war was to continue between France and Spain until 1659, these countries were willing to absorb the many Irish ‘swordmen’ who chose to follow the now long-established practice of enlisting in continental armies. Almost all of them did so choose, to a total of 34,000.³

Others left less willingly, being transported to the English plantations in America. Contemporary accounts would claim that vast numbers were rounded up in organised slave-hunts, and this version of events has become part of the Irish legend, being repeated, for example, by Prendergast when he wrote a hundred years ago.⁴ The hard facts are not easy to come by with certainty, because of serious gaps in the surviving evidence.⁵ The English West Indian plantations originated with the occupation of St Kitts in 1624, and quite a number of Irish were among the original settlers, especially in the island of Montserrat. At first, their main crop was tobacco grown on small-holdings, but this gave way to sugar-cane, introduced in 1642 and grown on large plantations. Both crops demanded a good deal of labour, supplied either by slaves from Africa or by indentured servants from the home islands. These latter might either go freely or be transported as convicts, The crime of many of the convicts was that, in the language of the time, they were ‘sturdy beggars’, or, as a possibly more humane age would put it, they were poor and unemployed.

Prisoners of war were first transported by the English parliament in 1648, Scots after the battle of Preston and English after the capture of Colchester. It came quite naturally to Cromwell, then, to set aside those who had survived at Drogheda to be ‘shipped to the Barbadoes’. It was only with the completion of the conquest, however, that a government policy emerged. It is clear that between 1652 and 1655 many orders for transportation were issued, sometimes for great numbers of people. These fell into two broad classes: first, persons dangerous to the state (we sometimes find transportation ordered for extreme recalcitrance as shown by refusal to transplant to Connacht, or by support for tories); and second, the poor and vagabonds.¹ Persons in these categories were liable to the same penalty in England, but the circumstances of Ireland made the categories much more extensive there. It is clear also that during these years the government tried and ultimately succeeded in controlling ruthless speculators, inured to the methods of the African slave trade, and not given to interpreting government orders too nicely. We have no direct indication of the numbers of those transported. That many in fact were transported is only an inference, but it would seem a reasonable one.

The national legend of the man-hunts is therefore founded on fact, although it exaggerates their scale and it errs in so far as it attributes them to government policy. They arose from commercial greed. This seems further proved by the fact that the scale of transportation slackened off after 1655, though it was in this year that the English occupied Jamaica. At the end of 1655 there was a proposal to transport 2,000 Irish boys and girls to that island; it may be taken as certain that they were not in fact transported. More revealingly, it would also seem certain that this scheme collapsed because the merchants did not find it profitable. Because the West Indies were now developing an economy based on large plantations, the African slave yielded better returns than the indentured servant. Irish bondsmen were particularly unprofitable, for the planters regarded them as a turbulent and politically unreliable element. Transported priests were especially unwelcome, for they gave cohesion to the catholic Irish community. One thoroughly documented case shows four transported priests being ordered to leave Barbados immediately on their arrival.

Transportation took place to Virginia as well as to the West Indies, but the colonists in New England refused to accept Irish catholics. For the West Indies, we have some figures for the late 1660s which may give some idea of the scale of the transportation, making allowance for the fact that they include the original Irish settlers or their descendants and also for an undoubtedly high death-rate. These figures indicate a total of about 8,000 Irish in Barbados, ‘derided by the negroes and branded with the epithet of white slaves’,¹ and 12,000 in the West Indies as a whole. Since sugar had been introduced in 1642 the number of African slaves had risen from 6,400 to 50,000.

Transportation and the exile of ‘swordmen’, however, only touched the fringes of the problem of clearance. Parliament was still preparing a bill when it was disbanded by Cromwell on 20 April 1653. The actual decision on what form the clearance should take was made by Cromwell and the council of state in an instruction to the Irish commissioners on 2 July, confirmed by the act for satisfaction of adventurers and soldiers passed by the nominated parliament on 26 September.² All forfeiting proprietors were to be settled in Connacht and Clare, but not in any port town or garrison. The act of 26 September added the further restriction that none was to be settled within four miles of the Shannon or the sea. This indicates the basic reason for the choice of Connacht, that its natural boundaries set it off from the rest of Ireland. The rates set out in the act of adventurers show that Ulster was then regarded as a poorer province.

Though an adequate survey of Connacht was available, immense practical problems faced the committee set up on 1 August to consider them. At this stage settlement was a secondary consideration. While the assumption was that only those qualified under the act of settlement were entitled to land in Connacht, the problem of clearance came first, as is indicated by a proclamation dated 14 October, which ordered to Connacht, before the appointed date of 1 May 1654, even those exempted from pardon for life or estate by the act of settlement.³ It was for a long time undecided whether there should be a total clearance, or a clearance of landowners only. The 1652 act of settlement had granted pardon to ‘the inferior sort’, but the army radicals pressed for a total clearance as retribution for collective guilt. It became evident, however, that there would be no mass settlement of protestant yeomen colonists: even the army rank and file were reluctant to settle. The ‘old protestants’ too were gradually consolidating their position. Their propaganda of the 1640s was now an embarrassment, but they urged the hard economic consideration that if the land was to be worked at all it must be worked by a catholic tenantry. The controversy came to a head in 1655, with a series of pamphlets exchanged between Vincent Gookin, an ‘old protestant’, and Richard Lawrence, a baptist army officer. This was the year in which Henry Cromwell arrived. The final decision was that only landowners should be transplanted, together with those dependants who should choose to go with them.

Among the landowners, there were some who claimed that they had surrendered on articles entitling them to at least a portion of their estates. Very few established this claim. The ‘articles of Galway’ and the ‘articles of Kilkenny’ were declared to have been abrogated by the acts of settlement and satisfaction. The ‘ancient inhabitants’ of the Munster ports believed they had shown ‘constant good affection’ to parliament. It is perhaps an indication of how absolutely impossible it was for any catholic to sustain such a claim that they failed to prove it to the satisfaction of a court. In what must be accepted as a sincere expression of final despair they said they would rather be transported to the Barbados than face the intimidation they might expect if transplanted to Connacht. Finally, they were assigned land in the Cork baronies of Barrymore and Muskerry. In this dispensation from the obligation to transplant they were almost unique.¹

For those who had to go, courts of delinquency were set up in each military precinct, to decide their ‘qualifications’ according to the act of settlement. The revenue commissioners in each precinct were to issue passports with certificates giving particulars of each party, so that in every case an allotment of land in Connacht might be made by a group of five commissioners sitting in Loughrea, of necessity as yet provisionally, for no man could be allotted lands equivalent to one-third or two-thirds of his estate, as the case might be, while this was as yet unsurveyed. The wording of these certificates brings out with vivid pathos a shattered people on the move:

Sir Nicholas Comyn, numb at one side of his body of a dead palsy, accompanied only by his lady, Catherine Comyn, aged thirty-five years, middle stature; and one maidservant, Honor ny McNamara, aged twenty years, brown hair, middle stature; having no substance, but expecting the benefit of his qualification.…

Pierce, Viscount Ikerrin, going with seventeen persons, four cows, five garrans, twenty-four sheep and two swine, and claiming against sixteen acres of winter corn.…

Ignatius Stacpole of Limerick, orphant, aged eleven years, flaxen haire, full face, low stature; Katherine Stacpoole, orphant, sister to the said Ignatius, aged eight years, flaxen haire, full face; having no substance to relieve themselves, but desireth the benefit of his claim before the commissioners of the revenue.²

There was a flood of petitions from people seeking to delay transplantation, and the evidence is that many of these were granted, at first for one month to certain tightly defined categories only, but later more freely, while the very flood of petitions forced the postponement of the final date for departure to 1 May 1655.¹ As the months passed, an even more basic consideration began to obtrude: it was necessary to plant a crop and in turn reap the harvest. But in the summer of 1654 very many crossed into Connacht, to present themselves before the Loughrea commissioners or at least spy out the land. Though the evidence suggests that this occurred on a scale that can only indicate widespread panic, and that all who presented themselves were given every facility that circumstances allowed, things were still going too slowly for the government, and an order of 30 November 1654 ordered all ‘transplantable persons’ to be gone by 1 March following.

That they did not in fact go is indicated by the setting-up of courts martial on 19 March, with power to inflict sentence of death for refusal to transplant, though this was with few exceptions reserved as an ultimate threat, and the penalties normally imposed for recalcitrance were banishment, transportation, or enforced transplantation. One factor favouring the government's plans was that the Civil Survey was taking shape, making possible a definitive settlement in Connacht. Much confusion had arisen from the desire to transplant as many as possible without enquiring too nicely into their qualification, and some of the Loughrea commissioners, without surveys or records to control their decisions, had used the opportunity to enrich themselves, either by seizing lands or by accepting bribes, for which two of them were later dismissed. They were comparatively small fry, and unlucky to be caught.² At the end of 1654, a ‘court of claims and qualifications’ where all must present themselves was set up in Athlone. This court was provided with the Civil Survey and what were officially known as the ‘books of discrimination’ but were soon popularly called ‘the black books of Athlone’, notably the depositions compiled in 1642 and the records of the Kilkenny confederates. On the other hand, the task of settling Connacht was made more difficult because enough land was not available in the rest of Ireland to satisfy the soldiers, and by this date Sligo, Leitrim, and the barony of Tirawley in County Mayo had been taken for this purpose from the lands allotted to the Irish catholics, and people already settled there had to transplant again. Up to 1656 the final fate of Clare was quite uncertain, though in the end most of it was available to the Irish. The important decisions on those affected by the articles of Kilkenny and Galway were not taken until April and July 1655 respectively. In consequence, notwithstanding the progress of the Civil Survey and the establishment of the Athlone commissioners, the work of settlement still went slowly, and now with fears that there might not be enough land in Connacht to satisfy those entitled to it.

Various attempts were made to sort out the confusion. Detailed ‘additional instructions’ of 16 June 1655 ordered the Loughrea commissioners to set out the lands in order within each county, taking the baronies one after the other and filling each before proceeding to the next. They were further urged to speed things up, even with rough justice (with an implication that this had already been meted out fairly frequently). If possible, they were not to disturb further those already settled, unless they agreed to move, though the reference to provision for forfeiting proprietors who already held lands in Connacht could be read as indicating that this was the first time the administration had seriously adverted to the fact that Connacht as well as the other three provinces had papist inhabitants for whom it was necessary to provide.

The pressure to transplant was maintained, and if anything stepped up. The news that Irish troops in the French service had taken part in the massacre of the Vaudois in April 1655 prompted a letter from Ireland to the lord protector in May urging ‘let the blood of Ireland be fresh in your view, and their treachery cry aloud in your ears…and let not such be left untransplanted here, or unminded in England’;¹ and Milton's blazing sonnet calling for vengeance, while it omits mention of the Irish, closes with almost predictable reference to ‘the triple tyrant’ and ‘the Babylonian woe’. Nevertheless, the sheer shortage of land was giving rise to serious problems. A further attempt to impose some kind of order on the settlement came in February 1656, in the form of proposals that all those transplanted from named counties should be assigned lands in named baronies in the four counties of Clare, Galway, Mayo, and Roscommon. This was only partially achieved, though perhaps to a surprising extent in view of the numbers already settled under totally different instructions or no specific instructions at all, and in view of the reports of the Loughrea commissioners that certain baronies were ‘totally exhausted’ or that they could not find any land to satisfy decrees already given. At this stage one gets the impression of the growth of a mood of indifference and irresponsibility, of land being broken up and people moved around indiscriminately. This impression is particularly strong if one considers the records of the Connacht proprietors transplanted within the province.

Attempts were made to make more land available, especially by reducing to one mile the exempted line along the Shannon and the sea, but the pressure on land could not be met. At the end of 1656 it was admitted that many who fell under ‘the first qualifications’, that is, those entitled neither to life nor land, were in fact in possession of lands in Connacht, while at the same time there was no land to give to those who were entitled to it, that indeed there had been ‘great stopes [sic] of land’ set out to the former, ‘either through inadvertency or supposing that there would be forfeited lands to spare’.² This tongue-in-cheek statement obviously does not fully explain why during 1656 persons exempted by name from pardon for life or estate had received considerable estates in Connacht—for example, 11,574 acres were granted to William Nugent, earl of Westmeath, 3,427 acres to Sir Thomas Esmond, and 2,852 acres to Sir Richard Barnewall.

Dr R. C. Simington speculates on ‘a secret compromise, this being the repeal of the death sentences, coming within the first qualifications, for the territorial reductions in the province and county [Clare] in the interests of the commonwealth armies’.¹ Some understanding there must have been, though one might question if it was in these terms (for in this context the commonwealth had no need to bargain), or if indeed it was expressed in any explicit terms at all. The situation must have arisen from the concurrence of a number of decisions: the decision not to press ahead with the workings of the high court of justice; the decision to allow, indeed to command, those not entitled to land or life to betake themselves to Connacht; and the fact that the Loughrea commissioners granted them land there, not always perhaps ‘through inadvertence’. As already suggested, the two commissioners dismissed for corrupt practices were probably small fry sacrificed as a covering gesture. In circumstances like this, wealth and connection could sometimes help catholics too. Cromwell himself occasionally intervened in favour of individuals, usually unsuccessfully. Not always, however: on 2 June 1654 Fleetwood wrote to John Thurloe, the secretary of state, asking him to ensure that Sir Richard Barnewall and other Irish magnates then in London were not allowed access to the lord protector,² but Barnewall's extensive grant of land in Connacht indicates that he not merely gained access to Cromwell but successfully pleaded his case with him.

By the end of 1656, then, the situation may be summarised somewhat as follows. There was no more land left for catholics. Some legally liable to execution, even some named as such, had received lands. Some who had been allotted land, and who were legally entitled to it, had to be told that no land was available. Some had not transplanted, either in continuing defiance or because there was nothing to transplant to, ‘living only and coshering on the common sort of people who were tenants’,³ and shading imperceptibly into those in active defiance, the ‘tories’.

An ‘act for the attainder of the rebels in Ireland’ was passed on 26 June 1657 in an attempt to make good the legal uncertainty and subsequent administrative confusion.⁴ In effect, it declared that the transplantation was over, that the instructions of 2 July 1653 had been ‘duly executed and performed’. It set this in the context of a declaration that all ‘rebels’ and ‘papists’—the terms were now synonymous—had been guilty of high treason, but that this was pardoned to those who had transplanted. Those not transplanted by 24 September would forfeit all claim to benefit, and no claim could be prosecuted after 1 June 1658. Prosecution and punishment of those not transplanting continued, though what claim they could advance if there was no more land to allot was a question discreetly ignored. The transplantation was over. While a survey of the country as a whole must be deferred until we have seen what happened in the other three provinces, at this stage a brief summary may be given of the effects of the transplantation on the catholic landowners.

The work of Dr Simington has provided the materials for assessment,¹ but it still awaits detailed analysis. However, even at this stage some general conclusions may be drawn. It has already been noted that, with very rare exceptions, all catholic landowners were transplanted. Dr Simington has given preliminary estimates of the effects of the whole transplantation. To these I would add equally preliminary estimates of the impact on one county, Wexford.² They fit fairly well into his general pattern.

On Petty's estimate—and so far we have nothing really better—there were about 3,000 ‘landed Irish papists’ in Ireland in 1641.³ Approximately 1,900 transplanters received decrees for about 700,000 acres, plantation measure, in Connacht, but of these only about 770 came from the other three provinces. Between them these received 420,576 acres. Sixty-five received allotments of more than 2,000 acres, but, as must be obvious, many got very small holdings indeed. The experience of the Connacht proprietors transplanted within Connacht was similar.⁴

The case of Sir Thomas Esmond is excluded from the Wexford figures, partly because he also held land in Wicklow, for which the Civil Survey is not extant, and partly because his exclusion may help to give a better picture of what happened to those who could bring no particular influence to bear. Again, the figures must be approximations, taking into account the imperfections of the Civil Survey and the fact that a complete cross-check of homonyms among proprietors’ names would demand immensely detailed local research, with final accuracy perhaps impossible. Nor is this the only complication. For example, ‘Nicholas Devereux esq. and Richard Devereux his son gent.’ are named as ‘tituladoes’ in Kilmore parish, Bargy barony, in the ‘1659 census’. A check of those of their family name in the transplantation lists and Civil Survey—almost all of them here listed as ‘Irish papists’ but with the occasional ‘English protestant’ to complicate matters—can do no more than suggest ramifications of family relationships, now beyond recovery, that even before 1641 may have transcended differences of religious allegiance in the interests of family property and position, and possibly continued to exercise an influence through the 1650s.

In 1641 catholics still held almost 60 per cent of the land in County Wexford, approximately 210,000 profitable acres, divided among about 380 proprietors, many of them with comparatively modest holdings. Of these, 86, that is 23 per cent, had lands set out to them in Connacht, to a total of something over 20,000 acres, almost exactly 10 per cent of the land in catholic hands in Wexford in 1641. This gives each Wexford proprietor in Connacht an average of 43 per cent of his former holding. Most of them, therefore, may be presumed to have fallen under the seventh qualification of the act of settlement, that is, they had taken part in the war and were entitled to one-third of their estates. A total of almost 300, or 77 per cent, disappeared as landed proprietors, some no doubt dead, some having emigrated, some banished or transported, some still unsatisfied when the act of 1657 declared the transplantation finished. This rough-and-ready survey for one county can of course be offered only as an example, and it would be foolhardy to propose it as a pattern for the country as a whole. It might be noted, for example, that relatively few Ulster names turn up among those assigned lands in Connacht, and it seems certain that migrants from Ulster settled in the inhospitable lands of Leitrim, though this had been assigned to the army. All in all, however, the figures I have tried to establish for Wexford may not be an inaccurate indication of the general pattern of what took place in Leinster and Munster.

To turn now to the adventurers and soldiers. When it came to a settlement, the adventurers as a group had changed considerably, many of the original investors having sold their interests. The original number, 1,533, had shrunk to 1,043, of whom 664 had invested at the beginning and 379 had subsequently bought their way in. On 6 April 1652 they put in their claims for 1,038,202 acres of profitable land.¹ They were, however, not anxious to plant while the country was still so disturbed, and meanwhile the army officers began to press for a general settlement which would not have to await the satisfaction of the adventurers. A plan emerged, ultimately to be embodied in the act of satisfaction, to settle, by equal divisions between the adventurers and soldiers, ten contiguous counties—Antrim, Down, Armagh, Meath, Westmeath, King's, Queen's, Tipperary, Limerick, and Waterford, with Louth held as additional security for the adventurers, should it be needed. The act reserved four counties for the government, Dublin, Kildare, Carlow, and Cork, and assured the army that all arrears would be met, and that if possible even the rank and file would receive land at the ‘act rates’. From the beginning, the soldiers had justified fears that this would not in fact be possible even though their satisfaction was made the first charge on all remaining confiscated land, except in Connacht.

The act of adventurers had stipulated that the land was to be distributed by lot, and this was confirmed in the act of satisfaction. For security reasons, soldiers and adventurers were to be mixed in the plantation, the baronies of each county being divided into two equal parts, to be drawn for by lot between them. In the subsequent division, also by lot, the adventurers had certain advantages, because it was fairly certain that there would be enough land to satisfy them and because, being a comparatively small number, they could draw their lots directly as individuals. However, the gross survey was so imperfect that even the adventurers were groping in the dark. It did not indicate exactly how much land a barony contained, nor how much was profitable and how much unprofitable, and there was no clear knowledge of how much was to be confiscated and how much was not. Further, the flat rates at which the land had been valued in 1642 bore little relation to the varying value of the land now to be actually distributed. Yet the adventurers as a body clung to the ‘gross survey’ and the ‘act rates’, fearing that any revision must work to their disadvantage in favour of the soldiers. Some baronies might turn out in fact to have too much land, others too little, so that a man drawing in one of the latter might find that there was no land to satisfy him, while no one was willing to admit to a surplus. The way was open for greed, scramble, and bribery. Inevitably, it was the small investor who suffered.¹

Three separate surviving sources list the adventurers and the land they actually drew.² Many drew large estates that established them as landlords, such as Sir William Brereton with 6,700 acres in Tipperary and Armagh, William Hawkins with 32,395 acres in Down, and Thomas Vincent with 19,044 acres in Meath, King's, and Queen's Counties. But many drew very small areas; up to 20 per cent had credits of less than £50. These small investors are the most intriguing element in the mass of information recently assembled by computer³—men like John Winkfield, a London haberdasher, a married man, who invested £40 under the original act for adventurers, made no further investment, but did not sell, and drew 66 acres in the barony of Stradbally in Queen's County. Unfortunately, the one question the computer has not answered is what he did with it. Did he settle, did he sell it, or did he lose it in the scramble ? The first would seem by far the least likely. The Books of Survey and Distribution have been published for three of the planted counties only: Cork, Kilkenny, and Westmeath.⁴ While the evidence of these books needs much further sifting and collation with the lists in the 1659 ‘census’ before any firm conclusions can be drawn it does seem clear that many adventurers who drew small lots did not in fact plant, and that numerous speculators were profitably active. Of the 1,043 adventurers who drew land, about 500 had it confirmed to them by the restoration acts of settlement. Almost certainly they formed the great majority of those who actually planted, and most of them drew sufficient land to establish them as landlords.

In their allotment of land the army faced all the adventurers’ problems, and others as well. First, the sum due to each soldier had to be established. He was then issued with a debenture. This was not in itself a title to land, nor could it be, for the army continued to press for a more realistic valuation of the land available, convinced that this could only work in its favour. What was clear was that there simply would not be enough land, even though most of Ireland, excluding what was reserved to the government and the adventurers, but including Sligo, Leitrim, and the barony of Tirawley in County Mayo from the catholics’ share, was quickly made available. When Petty was commissioned to survey the soldiers’ lands he made a preliminary estimate that they could be satisfied at the rate of 12s. 6d. in the pound. The army was not inclined to regard this as satisfaction, but it became the rate generally adopted.

In spite of the progress of the Down Survey, the great numbers of the soldier-claimants made definitive allotment difficult. The general plan was that they should draw for their lots regiment by regiment as they were disbanded, and that within the regiments each troop or company should make the final division among themselves by lot or agreement. The private soldiers could expect only very small allotments, because their pay was so small in comparison with that of the officers. Most of them were not anxious to settle. For some, soldiering had become a way of life: in 1656, 1,500 enlisted for service in Jamaica. Many just wanted to get back to England and the simple necessities of life, like good beer and cheese. It was the officers who conducted the long and involved negotiations with the government, and in the outcome they more and more came to dictate the pattern of the settlement of the army.

Of the land drawn by individual soldiers we have no detailed records such as exist for the adventurers. In all 33,419 debentures were issued, but only 11,804 were returned for certificates of possession. The number who actually settled may have been slightly greater, for there are instances of soldiers who held on to their debentures even after being put in possession, because they still hoped that they might be awarded land at better rates. The explanation for the missing 21,615 lies in the fact that most of the soldiers disposed of their debentures, normally by sale to their officers. In these circumstances, the debentures naturally depreciated. The government, seeing the threat to its plan to establish a protestant yeoman class, at first tried to stop the sales. Then it tried to hold the debentures at a rate of 8s. in the pound, but, on Petty's evidence, as early as 1653 they regularly changed hands at 45. or 5s.¹ Nor was all the dealing honest. The way was open for all kinds of chicanery and again we may reasonably suspect it was the small men who suffered.

Petty was reluctantly allowed to survey the adventurers’ lands only in 1658. The survey disclosed a surplus, but a small one. The settlement was still unfinished at the restoration. It seems certain that some soldiers and even some adventurers received nothing. This is beyond doubt as regards the Munster garrisons who had defected to Cromwell in 1649. No provision had been made for them in the act of satisfaction, but their claims were recognised in an ordinance of 27 June 1654. This, however, still left them at the end of the list, and the restoration act of settlement makes it clear that at least some of them got nothing.

It may be taken as certain that about 12,000 soldiers actually settled. Of these, about 7,500 had their lands confirmed to them after the restoration. The officers of the Cromwellian army became a prominent element in the new landlord class.⁴ The yeoman element was sizeable, but thinly spread over the country as a whole, and, as continuing complaints were to make clear, they were dangerously prone to intermarry and go native.

The failure of the catholic inhabitants of the Munster port towns to prove ‘constant good affection’ may be taken as indicating that it was almost impossible for any catholic to do so, and that in consequence, under the commonwealth, catholics almost without exception ceased to be property-holders east of the Shannon. That this loss of property in no way involved a clearance of all catholics will be apparent from a consideration of the towns and the ‘five counties’ bounded by the Boyne and the Barrow, where it was most explicit policy that no papist should remain.

The towns had suffered heavily in a war that had been a succession of sieges. Protestant colonists did not come to them from England in sufficient numbers, and efforts to attract protestants from the Continent or the New England colonies came to little or nothing, so that the towns did not recover their prosperity during the commonwealth regime. Their fortunes varied, of course, from Dublin, which had never suffered siege or capture, and was predominantly protestant, to Galway at the other end of the scale, where civic life to all intents and purposes broke down. Under the commonwealth the catholics lost control of the town corporations and were not permitted to engage in trade, though before this the bulk of overseas trade had been in catholic hands, Dublin alone having a sizeable protestant mercantile community. These two developments represented an erosion of catholic political and economic power comparable to what had been lost in the land-confiscations. Yet the towns could not continue to function at all if catholics were altogether excluded. In March 1654 the military governor of Wexford was asking the commissioners in Dublin whether any Irish papist could be permitted to live in the town, and in particular how many seamen, boatmen, and fishermen, how many packers and gillers of herrings, how many coopers, how many masons and carpenters, how many labourers and porters? He was told that none might remain without special licence after 1 May, and that he was to give the Dublin authorities a list of the tradesmen and labourers that he and the commissioners of revenue in Wexford thought it absolutely necessary to retain.¹ If there was further correspondence on the point it has not survived, but it is not hard to decide what happened. Continuing proclamations ordering the towns to be cleared of papists indicate only that they were ineffective.

It was planned also to clear entirely of papists the lands between the Barrow, the Boyne, and the sea, but the absence of yeoman protestant planters made it in the interest of the new landowners to press for the retention of a catholic working class. By the spring of 1655 the proposal to clear the whole area had diminished into an attempt to decide what part of it might be totally cleared, in what part Irish labour might be allowed to remain, and how for security the rest might be temporarily laid waste. The grim reality of this last proposal is confirmed by a report in the summer of the following year that the Irish were returning in such numbers to Wicklow that ‘that fast county is in short time likely to become a nest and sheltering place of loose and dangerous persons’. By now one can almost predict the reaction: an order to remove ‘all such Irish papists out of the said county of Wicklow…it being hoped and intended the same should be thoroughly and seasonably planted and inhabited by protestants of this and the English nation’.² One can also be certain that this order was not effectively carried out.

The Irish remained, then, as tenants, some of these being the old proprietors. Tenants to work the land were indeed in such demand that they were in a very strong position. John Lynch, an aristocratic ecclesiastic from a Galway that had vanished, noted from his exile in St Malo reports of their growing ‘insolence’.³ They remained as labourers and tradesmen in the towns. There is one class that history is inclined to forget, because it has left such scanty traces, the landless labourers, the ‘pedees and garcones’ whom an order of 1655 still judged to be ‘transplantable persons’.⁴ They possibly made up three-quarters of the population, and were scarcely affected at all. The hearth-money rolls and the census of 1659 show that they remained in large numbers, even in the northern counties of Ulster. The tempest that had passed over the country had left those who had survived it in a condition possibly not markedly more wretched than it had been before.

The Irish also remained as ‘tories’ who ‘went on their keeping’ and defied the government. In the later days of the confederate wars the opposing armies had to some extent lived by raiding one another's quarters. The English adopted the abusive word ‘tory’ to describe those who raided them.¹ After the surrender of the Irish armies in 1652, resistance continued from many small bands of ‘tories’. The government hunted them down for execution—the tory with the wolf and the priest were the ‘three beasts that lay burthens upon us’, as they were described by Major Anthony Morgan, and they were dealt with by putting a price on their heads. They were killed in great numbers, and the government encouraged the formation of bands of Irish to hunt them, being prepared even to dispense proprietors from transplantation in return for this service.² The ‘tories’ could count on the support of the local Irish population, though these were exposed to fine, imprisonment, transplantation, or transportation as deterrents, but in spite of all repressive measures toryism was to survive as a problem after the restoration.

In some respects the economy improved. There was little else for it to do. The new planters did bring greater efficiency in the long run, but in the short run there was a temptation to take a quick profit. The indications are that by 1660 the over-all situation had not recovered the level of 1640. Again, much detailed research in what documents are extant is still required to get an accurate picture of the land and towns of Ireland at the end of the commonwealth, but a note in the particulars accompanying the parish maps of the Down Survey for the barony of Gorey may not be untypical: ‘the soil is generally arable, meadow and pasture, but of late years grown much over with shrubs, heath and furze’.³

The second great impact of the Cromwellian settlement was in matters of religion. ‘I meddle not with any man's conscience’, Cromwell had declared at New Ross on 19 October 1649. There can be no real questioning of his sincere attachment to this difficult principle, but even before his Irish campaign events had already forced him to some modifications in his attempts to define how it might be applied in practice. His concept of religious liberty sprang from a root of Congregationalism. Of long standing within the Christian tradition as a whole, its influence has been seen in prereformation England with Wyclif and the Lollards. After the reformation, it drew strength from the opposition to the Elizabethan state-church and especially the interpretation given to this by Archbishop Laud. Its basic tenets were that all Christians shared a common priesthood, and that each local church should be independent (this word, indeed, being normally used at the time rather than congregational) as to its discipline and worship. However, what independency was to mean in practice had been decided in the great debates of 1647 within the council of the New Model army. Cromwell's victory over the ‘levellers’ had led to the acceptance of what might be described as ‘independency for men of property’. An essential element was that public order would be guaranteed by public authority. There was to be no absolute freedom in the propagation or open profession of opinion.

The basic confession of faith, drawn up by the Westminster assembly and approved by parliament in 1648, was something of an embarrassment, because it was essentially a presbyterian document (it has remained a basic confession of that faith), and presbyterianism was radically incompatible with Congregationalism, because of its rigid insistence on a uniform and detailed church-order. The directory for public worship approved by parliament in 1645 was more to the point. While it excluded the Book of Common Prayer, it did not prescribe a set form of worship but contented itself with giving general directions.

Under the commonwealth, then, the state kept a strict watch over religion. The act of uniformity was repealed, and men were not compelled to attend services repugnant to their consciences. But not all forms of service were allowed. Specifically ‘popery’ and ‘prelacy’ were excluded because they were ‘idolatry’ and were therefore forbidden by scripture.

The trouble in Ireland was that none of the denominations there, presbyterian, Church of Ireland, or catholic, could agree in conscience with the congregational principle. However, the first two managed to reach a practical accommodation with it. Having first outlined the system as established in Ireland, we can then turn to the question of how various shades of protestantism fared under it. Finally, there is the position of the catholic church, to which no toleration was extended.

In 1649 the presbyterians were solidly established in the north-east, where they had tenaciously defended themselves through the 1640s. With scattered exceptions, members of the Church of Ireland were concentrated in the enclaves round Dublin and Cork. The 1649 peace with Ormond had recognised the claims of the confederate catholics and the Church of Ireland in the areas they respectively held, though there were soon disputes about churches, church-livings, and ecclesiastical finances generally, especially in Munster where the border of each confession was by no means clearly defined.

When Ormond had handed Dublin over to parliament in 1647 the new authorities immediately notified the clergy that they must cease using the Book of Common Prayer.¹ Protests only led to an order imposing the directory for public worship. It seems fairly certain, however, that there was some clandestine use of the prayer-book at least over the next few years, if only because the parliamentary authorities had too much else on hand to have time to track down every instance of religious nonconformity.

The commissioners appointed in October 1650 had as part of their instructions an order to impose the English pattern of religion, to encourage qualified ministers and schoolmasters, and to pay them from the public funds. Church property was to be confiscated and let out to rent to produce the required revenue.

Schoolmasters were appointed only in very inadequate numbers. Neither was it easy to get ministers: even the Cromwellian army was quite short of them. Attempts were constantly made to attract ministers from England and the New England colonies, but there was no widespread enthusiasm for a call to Ireland, and some of those who came held views that imperilled the public-order aspect of the religious settlement. Under various pressures, a practical toleration of all protestant denominations began to emerge, always however with the proviso that the Book of Common Prayer would not be tolerated in divine service.

In England, an ordinance of 1654 had set up a committee of ‘triers’, composed of twenty-five ministers and nine laymen, to examine the qualifications of prospective ministers. The principle was followed in Ireland, but the pattern was less rigid. What happened was that prominent ministers, for the most part living in or near Dublin, were invited to serve on committees as occasion arose. Samuel Winter seems to have acted as unofficial chairman. Himself an independent, but of eirenic temperament, his basic puritanism approximated closely to that of the average Church of Ireland minister. In consequence, Winter's influence made it possible to smooth over many problems in appointing a ministry. He also showed himself a capable administrator of Trinity College, of which he had been appointed provost on 3 June 1652.

When the committee approved a candidate, the government appointed him on salary. These salaries were generous. Some received £200 a year, and the sum aimed at seems to have been about £100, though many received less. Every effort was made to provide the minister with a suitable house. On every Lord's Day he was to conduct the approved service at the meetinghouse. This was to be maintained by local contribution; in almost every case it was in fact the old parish church.

Between 1651 and 1659 there are records of the appointment of 376 state-salaried ministers. Of these, at least sixty-five can be identified as former ministers of the Church of Ireland (an enumeration made in 1647, certainly incomplete, lists ninety-one in the country at the time). Sixty-seven were presbyterians. A few can be identified as baptists, and almost all the remainder may be classed as independents. There were also quite a number of ministers not on salary. Some presbyterians, many baptists and other sectaries,¹ and doubtless some of the Church of Ireland ministers, refused a state salary for reasons of conscience.

Further developments, especially after the arrival of Henry Cromwell, made it easier for the conscience of presbyterian and Church of Ireland ministers. In 1656 and 1657 attempts were made to restructure the parish system (hitherto ministers had been appointed to specified localities, principally towns and garrisons). The plan adopted aimed at producing reasonably compact units, capable of yielding a salary of about £80 a year. This proved practicable only where there was a sizeable protestant population, and it seems to have been put into effect mainly in the presbyterian areas of Ulster.

In April 1658 Henry Cromwell summoned an assembly of ministers in Dublin. At this it became clear that many ministers of presbyterian or Church of Ireland convictions desired a restoration of payment by tithe. No record of its decisions is extant, but by the end of 1658 eighty ministers (fifty-nine of them, nearly all presbyterians, in the precincts of Belfast and Derry) were receiving their tithes directly, and it seems a reasonable inference that where these eighty ministers had been appointed the traditional parish system had been fully restored.

The question of ministerial ordination also moved towards a settlement in favour of the presbyterians and, in some measure, of the Church of Ireland, and away from the congregational position that ordination was only ‘an act of conveniency in respect to [public] order’. After 1655 the formation of associations of ministers was encouraged, and they began to give expression to the view that it was necessary that a minister be ordained by a minister. The Cork association, where episcopacy was strong, even admitted the validity of episcopal ordination. However, the times were not in favour of anything beyond the presbyterian point of view, though it is clear that on this central issue opinion had turned against the more radical sectaries.

To all intents and purposes the Church of Ireland clergy accepted the congregational structure. Their basically puritan religious outlook was in many cases strengthened by a political inclination to parliament. The most practical point of conscience at issue was the ban on the prayer-book, and this, by and large, they accepted. Four of their bishops lived in Ireland during the decade. One, Henry Jones of Clogher, made for himself a civil and military career. The other three accepted government pensions. The personnel of the church, then, was not seriously disrupted.

The presbyterians formed a more compact community, with a stronger political position and, one might venture to say, tougher convictions.¹ One strong conviction was a commitment to monarchy with the covenant, and the execution of Charles I had led to a protest made famous by Milton's attack on the ‘blockish presbyters…set so haughtily in the pontifical see of Belfast’.² As the Cromwellian conquest proceeded and as Scottish support rallied to Charles II, pressure on the Irish presbyterians grew. Some of the ministers had to flee to Scotland or go into hiding, while others were imprisoned.

In January 1651 Charles II, having accepted the covenant, was crowned in Scotland. The Irish government stepped up its persecution of the presbyterians, and attempted to impose on them the oath of ‘engagement’ to be loyal to the commonwealth. Government and presbyterian accounts differ as to whether any ministers took it, but it seems a fair inference that a few did. At the worst period only five or six ministers in all remained at liberty. In May 1653 an order was made for the transplantation of about 260 leading presbyterians to Kilkenny, Tipperary, and Waterford. It came to nothing, and indeed the presbyterians may have been more willing to go than the government was to transplant them.

In any case, by now the situation in Scotland was being brought under control, and a few months later a change of policy became apparent when the government announced its willingness to pay salaries to presbyterian ministers. They for their part were slow to accept, but from now on they were in practice free to function, their main problem arising from the fact that those returning from Scotland brought with them the involved disputes that had broken out there between ‘resolutioners’, who supported Charles II, and ‘remonstrants’, prepared to work with the commonwealth. While the majority of Irish presbyterians came to accept the ‘remonstrant’ position, a minority remained hostile ‘resolutioners’. By the end of 1655 a number of ministers had accepted salaries, and an uneasy agreement was gradually reached with Henry Cromwell's administration. It was uneasy because on certain points the presbyterians as a body did not really yield, notably in their insistence that a minister needed presbyterial ordination and a call from his congregation. The tensions remained even though on this point events turned in their favour, and possibly only the death of Oliver Cromwell prevented a new confrontation.

The sects did not proliferate in Ireland to anything like the same extent as in England, but two at least call for some notice, the baptists and the quakers. Both may be regarded as essentially ‘congregational’, but each because of special tenets had problems in fitting into the qualified independency of the state religion. The baptists did not fit into the pattern of independency because they absolutely refused to accept that infant baptism was true baptism. For this reason their opponents frequently called them ‘anabaptists’. Though they tended to reject the name as abusive, it implied a radical political and spiritual outlook that many of them did in fact accept. They found Cromwell's acceptance of the protectorate very hard to stomach, and on this point they made common ground with Charles Fleetwood, though he himself was an independent. In 1653 baptist congregations had been established in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Clonmel, Kilkenny, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Galway, and Carrickfergus. Less than a dozen of their ministers are to be found in the lists of those salaried, but they were reluctant to accept salaries and many were unlicensed. They were especially strong in the army. Henry Cromwell clearly regarded them as a threat to civil order as well as to military discipline, but at the beginning of 1658 he could report to Thurloe that they had become very quiet and that if they were content to accept equal treatment he was prepared to give it to them.

He adopted the same attitude to the quakers, though these, with their central tenet of the ‘inner light’, were less tractable. Before their organisation by George Fox in 1669 their undoubtedly sincere witness could pose problems for those responsible for public order (in 1658 two quakers arrived in Rome to convert the pope). Many of their practices, notably their refusal to pay tithes or to contribute to the upkeep of ‘steeple-houses’, as they disparagingly called the churches, or their insistence on entering the ‘steeple-houses’ to dispute with the ‘hireling’ minister, drew persecution on them. At the end of 1655 an order was made for the arrest of all quakers, and ninety-two were imprisoned and six banished. Though in the last three years of the commonwealth there is record of only nine quakers being imprisoned, they continued to be a strain on the official policy of toleration.

No toleration could be extended to the papists.¹ Many plans were proposed for their conversion, and a number of ministers deputed to preach in Irish, though converts were few and their motives nearly always suspect. The assembly of ministers in 1658 discussed the topic, though by this time it seems to have been accepted that in fact there would not be large-scale conversions.

At the outbreak of the war there were fifteen catholic bishops in Ireland, all of them appointed between 1618 and 1630. Three further provisions had been made on 16 September 1641 (n.s.), though that of Louis Dillon to Achonry did not take effect, so that at the beginning of the confederacy there were seventeen bishops. At its end there were twenty-seven, only three sees being vacant, Deny, Kildare, and Achonry. Ten of these bishops were survivors of the original eighteen, and most of them were now old men. Seventeen had been provided during the confederate period, ten in 1647.

It is possible to give a rough estimate of the numbers of the regular clergy. There were about 1,600 friars, of whom 1,000 were Franciscans and 400 Dominicans. In addition there were about sixty monks, nearly all of them Cistercians. Even a rough estimate of the numbers of the diocesan clergy is not possible, but it may be said with certainty that there were not enough to man all the parishes. For this and other reasons only a very untidy parish-system had developed before 1641. Further complications were the claims of the friars to minister independently of the bishops in virtue of faculties from Rome, monastic claims based on extensive impropriations of parishes in pre-reformation times, and the dependence of all the clergy on the more wealthy catholic laity, which introduced an unofficial but very real element of lay patronage. Between 1642 and 1649 little was done to resolve the problems or to tidy up the system, but in the areas held by the confederates catholic priests ministered freely and in sufficient numbers, and the peace of 1649 had granted them the churches and church-livings in these areas.

When he broke with the Kilkenny confederates, Rinuccini and his party had come to place some hopes in the commitment of the English independents to religious toleration, and these hopes were certainly a factor in Owen Roe O'Neill's agreement with parliament in 1649. But Cromwell's declaration at New Ross in October, confirmed the following January in his reply to the prelates at Clonmacnoise, made it unequivocally clear that for him liberty of conscience did not extend to tolerating the mass or the catholic church.¹ Cromwell—it was part of his almost tortured commitment to freedom of conscience—was concerned over the position of catholics in England, and his relations with them present problems as yet only partially explored. But whatever may have lain deep in his conscience—and theologically he was far removed from Catholicism—toleration of popery in Ireland was an emotional, political—and economic—impossibility.

Catholic priests had inevitably been among those killed at Drogheda and Wexford. Cromwell recounts that at Drogheda all except two ‘were knocked on the head promiscuously’. These two were later captured and executed. One of them, having tried to pass as a lieutenant, confessed that he was a friar when he learned that there was no quarter for officers, but, Cromwell adds grimly, ‘that did not save him’.² Cromwell's reply to the declaration of the bishops at Clonmacnoise, issued at the end of January 1650, had attacked the clergy as leaders of the rebellion and responsible for the massacres of 1641, and had threatened blood for blood. Yet the practice varied during the campaign of 1650. There are instances of priests being treated more or less as officers in a hostile army, and put to death in circumstances in which officers were executed, but there are also instances of their lives being spared, and Cromwell was more merciful than ‘old protestants’ such as Broghill and Coote.

The act of settlement of 12 August 1652 seemed to introduce a distinction among the clergy, for it laid down that all ‘priests and Jesuits’ involved in any way in the rebellion were to forfeit their lives. This too was not applied with full rigour, for the high court of justice did not seriously attempt to deal with all the cases it should in theory have dealt with. How many priests were killed or executed cannot be known with certainty. Some accounts do not name the victims, and it is a not unreasonable assumption that during the war some deaths went unrecorded. In regard to those recorded, mainly by refugees in Europe, it is likewise a not unreasonable assumption that in this emotional context there was the possibility of legendary development, at least in regard to details, and in some cases possibly in regard to the very substance of the story. A total of ninety-two names based on the evidence of contemporaries has been submitted in the cause for the beatification of the Irish martyrs.¹

Questions have been raised in a number of these cases. It has been urged that some, including the three bishops executed (Boetius MacEgan of Ross, Heber MacMahon of Clogher, and Terence Albert O'Brien of Emly) were put to death on primarily political charges, though in the circumstances the distinction between politics and religion is not easily drawn, while other cases have been questioned because the evidence comes from one source only, recognised as untrustworthy at least in regard to detail.²

By the middle of 1651 it is clear that many priests were being held in prison. As the Irish field armies surrendered in 1652 a new policy began to take shape. These soldiers were allowed, even encouraged, to go into exile, and were given time to arrange their transport. In some instances the articles of surrender allowed the same terms to their chaplains. Further ordinances promised passes to migrate from Ireland to all priests not facing capital charges, and with the suspension of the activities of the high court of justice in 1654 it became more or less settled policy that catholic priests should be exiled.¹ The priests do not appear to have gone as readily as the soldiers, although on 6 January 1653 the commissioners of parliament ordered that any priest who had agreed to go but had delayed his departure for more than twenty days, or who had gone but had returned from exile, was to be subject to the penalties of the English statute of 1585 (27 Eliz., c. 2), which had made a catholic priest guilty of treason by the very fact of his presence in the country, and made it a felony to harbour or assist him. There were several petitions against the extension to Ireland of this harsh English legislation, but the commissioners, while insisting that no one would be compelled to attend worship or divine service contrary to his conscience, were equally insistent that the order banishing the priests must be strictly executed.²

Very many priests did go into exile. Again we can have no certain figures, but 1,000 may be a conservative estimate. Many found succour in one measure or another in catholic Europe, and in exile continued even more bitterly the recriminations that had rent the confederacy.³ In practice, a month's protection, or even more, was regularly extended to priests who undertook to leave. To bring in those who would not, the government offered a reward for their capture, fixed at £5 in 1653. Attempts were made to levy this ‘head-money’ on the barony in which the priest was captured, while those who sheltered him, legally guilty of felony, were imprisoned. Occasionally priests were allowed to remain because of age or ill-health, if they gave an undertaking not to exercise their ministry, to live in a designated place, and to do nothing prejudicial to the commonwealth. One bishop, Eugene Sweeney of Kilmore, remained in Ireland on these terms for the whole of the 1650s.

While one can at times see shafts of human concern lighting up this unremitting persecution, it was dominated by a hatred of popery and the conviction that the success of the Cromwellian settlement depended on its eradication. At the beginning of 1655 it was ordered that those who refused to go into voluntary exile should be transported to Barbados. They were to be concentrated in prison to await shipment, first at Carrickfergus and later in the western islands of Aran and Inishbofin as well, where ‘popish priests and other dangerous persons’ could, at ‘sixpence daily allowance’ be employed in the ‘building of cabins and making of prisons’.⁴ The problem remained that the transporting of an indentured servant had to show a profit, and the priests were not attractive merchandise, either because of age or ill-health, or because no one in the plantations wanted them even if they were young and healthy.¹

Under this pressure a few—the surviving records suggest very few—abandoned their religion. Far more, but still a small minority of those active in 1649, tried to continue their ministry. After 1656 it is clear that priests were returning from Europe. They had to walk very warily. It would have been too dangerous, both for themselves and for their hosts, to have tried to depend on the laity. Some sought safety in the fastnesses of bogs or mountains, others moved around in disguise, or settled down as farmers or labourers. The tradition of a local ‘mass-rock’ is very widespread in Ireland, and in many places it may more probably be traced to this period than to the opening decades of the eighteenth century. The priestly ministry was reduced to a minimum, and its organisation to even less. Yet a Jesuit was able to teach school in the neighbourhood of New Ross, and in 1657 mass was being said in the Marshalsea prison in Dublin.

Among the laity, only the schoolmasters were singled out for direct persecution similar to that of the clergy. There were constant orders for their arrest and transportation, as they could not be moved to Connacht because, like the clergy, they were regarded as corrupting the people. Even less documented than the clergy, they seem like them to have been able to continue their work to some extent, but with great stealth, in constant danger, and drastically reduced numbers.

The trial, though sharp, was short. Not many defected. Lack of religious instruction was a more serious problem, as was the deprivation of sacramental life in a church where it was so central. The laity suffered if they harboured priests or schoolmasters, but in principle no one was compelled to attend religious worship contrary to his conscience. The upper classes suffered heavy loss of property and were excluded from all public office, though in the later years of the commonwealth it is clear that Henry Cromwell's administration was beginning to face the problem of what provision might be made for a whole population without any civil status at all, and how Irish papists might be distinguished from papists in England in ‘what privileges they may be deemed capable of’.² Two years later it had reached the wholly negative conclusion that the imposition of an oath of abjuration of the Stuarts, in terms involving the abjuration of popery as well, was not the answer.³ It does not seem to have got any further with the problem when the regime began to crumble.

On 16 April 1657 (n.s.) Edmund O'Reilly, the exiled vicar general of Dublin, was nominated archbishop of Armagh.¹ The same day Bishop Anthony MacGeoghegan of Clonmacnoise was appointed to Meath, and shortly afterwards thirteen vicars apostolic were named in other sees. Less than three years before. O'Reilly had been sentenced to death by the high court of justice in Dublin. It has already been suggested that he may possibly have owed his life and subsequent release to connections he had with people in power.² When after his consecration in Brussels in May 1658 he arrived in London in August with commendatory letters from Cardinal Mazarin he was able to make contact with Thurloe. Indeed in the uncertainty following the death of the lord protector, his chief difficulties seem to have arisen from other Irish catholic ecclesiastics in London who did not like him because they suspected that he was not loyal to the Stuarts. At any rate, he was deported to France in the spring of 1659, but the following autumn he sailed directly to Ireland, arriving at Passage, County Waterford, in October. Bishop MacGeoghegan had arrived a few months before him.

Archbishop O'Reilly's reports provide some definite information on the state of the catholic church in Ireland when he arrived. The five dioceses of the Dublin province had an average of seven priests apiece: the province of Armagh was better supplied, with an average of twenty-two. In some dioceses he found a number of regular clergy as well. They all lived, he wrote, ‘in much endurance and misery as to worldly things; they visit the sick by night; they celebrate mass before and round about dawn, and that in hiding places and recesses, having appointed scouts to look around and with eyes and ears agog to keep watch lest the soldiers come by surprise’. The archbishop himself had to be especially careful: ‘I did not enter the house of any catholic’, he wrote; ‘I had made for myself a small hut in a mountainous district, one here, another there, so that no one else should suffer for my sake’.³

His mission in Ireland was short. Charges of disloyalty made by fellow catholics grew in intensity, as the restoration of Charles II took shape, and in July 1660 he was summoned to Rome to explain himself. The letter may not have arrived in Ireland until near the end of the year. He sailed from Dublin on 25 April 1661, five weeks after the government had ordered his arrest. It was clear that the catholic church in Ireland was still dogged by the disputes and recriminations of the 1640s.

Even 300 years later, any Irish historian indulging in general reflections on Irish history in the troubled years between 1641 and 1660 puts himself to some extent at risk, for the cry of its ghosts still troubles our own days. It is clear who the winners were in the great upheaval. They were now established as the landed class, with, as Petty put it, ‘a gamester's right at least to their estates’, and in the years ahead would come to define themselves as ‘the protestant interest’. Political and economic considerations would ensure that the interest of the adventurers and army officers who had become landlords would be assimilated to that of the ‘old protestants’. ‘As for the bloodshed in the contest’, Petty continues, ‘God best knows who did occasion it’.¹ One might venture to add, trusting not to disturb too many ghosts, that the working up of the propaganda about the ‘guilty nation’ of papists was a deliberate appeal to religious passion made by a group grown rich on confiscated lands, in the interests of still more confiscation. By and large, the soldiers of the Cromwellian army were not the winners. In 1660 Ireland had more protestants than in 1641, but the broad pattern of their distribution was not greatly changed, the only heavy concentration being in north-east Ulster.

The catholics were clearly the losers. Here again one might recall how much suffering there was in Christian Europe at the time, as the religious wars drew to an end and a recognisably modern world began. One might recall in particular the hardships of the settlement of Bohemia after 1620 or the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain at about the same time. But one can hardly parallel the ruin that fell on the Irish catholics. For the Old Irish it was the last of a series of blows: the Old English lost almost everything in one catastrophe. Both retained their catholic religion, but history can scarcely assess what scarring it may have suffered. Both lost their property and in consequence lost political influence, and their basic culture was gravely at risk. The Old Irish culture, with incredible toughness, managed to survive, but the Old English found it much more difficult to retain their distinctive cultural qualities. That this was so must be only matter for regret. They may have been conservative to a fault, and ill equipped to meet much lesser developments than the catastrophe which struck them, but their political thinking, though it drew heavily on the past, did make an appeal to principles of lasting value. By 1660 these principles were stirring in a new context as ‘the protestant interest’ began to take shape, and the line of descent from Patrick Darcy continues in the catholic ‘patriot parliament’ of 1689 and with William Molyneux in 1698.²