IRELAND
1649–1650
The Second Civil War had its counterpart in Ireland, where in May, 1648,
Lord Inchiquin and the Munster Protestants threw off obedience to the
Parliament and hoisted the royal standard. Ormond returned again to
Ireland in September, 1648, and by January, 1649, he succeeded in
uniting Anglo-Irish Royalists and Confederated Catholics in a league
against the adherents of the Parliament. In vain Rinuccini, the Papal
Nuncio, opposed the league. The freedom and equality promised to the
Catholic religion, the independence promised to the Irish Parliament,
allured many even of the clergy to Ormond’s support. They called on the
Irish soldiers to fight for God and Cæsar under his banners, and engaged
to supply him with an army of twenty thousand men. In February, 1649,
Rinuccini left Ireland.
The King’s execution further swelled the royalist ranks; for whilst a
portion of the Ulster Presbyterians openly declared for Ormond, and
proclaimed Charles II., the rest threw off all semblance of obedience to
the Parliament. Only Owen Roe and the Ulster Irish, dissatisfied with
the terms of the treaty, stood aloof from the coalition, and,
negotiating first with Ormond, then with the parliamentary officers,
maintained for some time a neutral attitude. In Londonderry, Sir Charles
Coote still held out for the Parliament, Colonel Monk held Dundalk, and
Colonel Michael Jones, ever vigilant and energetic, maintained himself
in Dublin. Jones had been made Governor of Dublin, in June, 1647, when
Ormond gave it up to the Parliament. He had won a signal victory over
the Irish at Dungan’s Hill in August, 1647, and could be trusted to
fight to the last. But unless help came from England, the preservation
of these last strongholds was only a question of months.
It was not merely a question whether Ireland should be separated from
England, for it was certain that Ireland in royalist hands would be used
as a basis for an attack upon England. The young King’s messengers
announced his speedy coming to Ireland, and nothing but the lack of
money hindered his journey. Already Prince Rupert, with a squadron of
eight ships, was in the harbours of Munster. It was at this juncture
that the Council of State nominated Cromwell to command in Ireland
(March 15, 1649). The speech which Cromwell made to the officers of the
army a week later showed his appreciation of the crisis. “Your old
enemies,” he told them, “are again uniting against you.” Scotland had
proclaimed Charles II.; a great party in England was ready to co-operate
with the Scots; all parties in Ireland were joined together “to root out
the English interest there and set up the Prince of Wales.” “If we do
not endeavour to make good our interest there, and that timely, we shall
not only have our interest rooted out there, but they will in a very
short time be able to land forces in England, and put us to trouble
here.” All the national pride of an Englishman rose up at the thought of
Scottish or Irish interference.
[Illustration:
MAP OF IRELAND
to illustrate Cromwell’s Campaign.
B. V. Darbishire, Oxford 1899
]
“I confess,” he continued, “I have often had these thoughts with
myself which perhaps may be carnal and foolish: I had rather be
overrun by a Cavalierish interest than a Scotch interest, I had
rather be overrun by a Scotch interest than an Irish interest, and I
think that of all this is the most dangerous.... If they shall be
able to carry on their work they will make this the most miserable
people in the earth, for all the world knows their barbarism.... The
quarrel is brought to this state: that we can hardly return to that
tyranny which formerly we were under the yoke of, but we must at the
same time be subject to the kingdom of Scotland or the kingdom of
Ireland for the bringing in of the king. It should awaken all
Englishmen.”
At bottom, as Cromwell truly said, the quarrel was a national quarrel,
and the question was whether the growth of English freedom should be
checked by Irishmen and Scotchmen, seeking, for their own ends, to
replace the Stuarts on the throne they had lost. There was little real
danger of this so long as the army remained united. “There is more cause
of danger from disunion amongst ourselves than by anything from our
enemies.... I am confident we doing our duty and waiting upon the Lord,
we shall find He will be as a wall of brass round about us, till we have
finished that work that He has for us to do.” But with all this faith in
divine assistance, Cromwell did not underestimate the difficulty of
reconquering Ireland, and left nothing undone that was necessary to
secure success.
Cromwell refused to accept the command until he was certain of adequate
support from the Government, and after accepting it (March 30th)
declined to lead his soldiers across the sea until he was provided with
money for their payment. Parliament entrusted him for three years with
the combined powers of Lord-Lieutenant and Commander-in-chief, granting
him a salary for the two posts of about thirteen thousand pounds a year,
and giving him an army of twelve thousand men, well officered and well
equipped. The organisation of his army, the collection of ships to
transport it, and, more than all, the difficulty of raising money to
maintain it, delayed his start for more than four months, and it was not
till August 13th that Cromwell landed at Dublin.
If Ormond had been a great commander, or if Owen Roe had abandoned his
neutrality in March instead of in August, every English garrison might
have been taken before Cromwell’s coming. Inchiquin, Ormond’s
lieutenant, took Dundalk and Drogheda in July, and Ormond himself
blockaded Jones in Dublin. But Cromwell reinforced Jones with three
regiments from England, and on August 2nd the garrison of Dublin
surprised Ormond’s camp at Rathmines, and defeated him with a loss of
five thousand men. “An astonishing mercy,” wrote Cromwell, “so great and
seasonable that we are like to them that dreamed.” Its result was that
Ormond could bring together no army which was sufficient to face
Cromwell in the field, and was driven to rely on fortresses to check the
invader till he could gather fresh forces. Into Drogheda, the first
threatened, Ormond threw the flower of his army. Cromwell stormed
Drogheda on September 10th, and put the twenty-eight hundred men who
defended it to the sword. “I do not think thirty of the whole number
escaped with their lives,” he wrote. Then sending a detachment to the
relief of Londonderry, he turned his march southwards, and on October
11th took Wexford by storm. Some fifteen hundred of its garrison and its
inhabitants fell in the streets and in the market-place, and, as at
Drogheda, every priest who fell into the hands of the victors was
immediately put to death.
At Drogheda the order to spare none taken in arms had been deliberately
given by Cromwell after his first assault had been repulsed. At Wexford
the slaughter was accidental rather than intentional. Cromwell showed no
regret for this bloodshed. He abhorred the indiscriminating cruelties
practised by many English commanders of the time in Ireland, and no
general was more careful to protect peaceable peasants and
non-combatants from plunder and violence. “Give us an instance,” he
challenged Catholic clergy, “of one man, since my coming into Ireland,
not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or banished, concerning the massacre
or the destruction of whom justice has not been done or endeavoured to
be done.” But when towns were taken by storm, the laws of war authorised
the refusal of quarter to their defenders, and on this ground Cromwell
justified his action at Drogheda and Wexford. He justified it both on
military and political grounds. He had come to Ireland not merely as a
conqueror, but as a judge “to ask an account of the innocent blood that
had been shed” in the rebellion of 1641, and “to punish the most
barbarous massacre that ever the sun beheld.” Of the slaughter at
Drogheda he wrote:
“I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon those
barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent
blood, and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for
the future; which are the satisfactory grounds of such actions,
which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” Of Wexford he
said: “God, by an unexpected providence, in His righteous justice
brought a just judgment upon them, causing them to become a prey to
the soldiers who in their piracies had made preys of so many
families, and with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they
had exercised upon the lives of divers poor Protestants.”
Cromwell, in short, regarded himself, in Carlyle’s words, as “the
minister of God’s justice, doing God’s judgments on the enemies of God!”
but only fanatics can look upon him in that light. His justice was an
imperfect, indiscriminating, human justice, too much alloyed with
revenge, and, as St. James says, _Ira viri non operatur justitiam Dei_.
Politically these massacres were a blunder—their memory still helps to
separate the two races Cromwell wished to unite. From a military point
of view, however, they were for a short time as successful as Cromwell
hoped, in saving further effusion of blood.
“It is not to be imagined,” wrote Ormond, “how great the terror is
that those successes and the power of the rebels have struck into
this people. They are so stupefied, that it is with great difficulty
that I can persuade them to act anything like men towards their own
preservation.”
Trim and Dundalk were abandoned by their garrisons, Ross opened its
gates as soon as a breach was made in its walls, and Ormond’s English
Royalists deserted in scores. But, in November, when Cromwell attacked
Waterford, the spell was broken. Its stubborn resistance and the
tempestuous winter weather obliged him to raise the siege, for the
hardships of Irish campaigning had thinned his army, and a large part of
it were “fitter for an hospital than the field.” Michael Jones,
Cromwell’s second in command, died of a fever, and Cromwell himself fell
ill.
Meanwhile, the inherent weakness of the coalition which Ormond had built
up revealed itself. Between the Munster Protestants, whom Inchiquin had
induced to declare for the King in 1648, and their Catholic Irish allies
there was a gulf which no temporary political agreement could bridge
over. Before Cromwell left England, he had opened secret negotiations
with some of the commanders in Munster, and his intrigues now bore
fruit. In October, Cork expelled Ormond’s garrison, and in November,
Youghal, Kinsale, Bandon, and several smaller places hoisted the English
flag. Thus, by the close of 1649, all the coast of Ireland, from
Londonderry to Cape Clear, with the sole exception of Waterford, was in
Cromwell’s hands: “a great longitude of land along the shore,” wrote
Cromwell, “yet hath it but little depth into the country.”
The task of the next campaign was the extension of English rule inland.
After wintering in the Munster ports, Cromwell led his army against the
fortresses in the interior of Munster. Cashel, Cahir, and many castles
fell in February, and Kilkenny, the seat of the Irish Catholic
Confederation, capitulated at the end of March.
More and more the war became a purely national war between Celts and
English. The last of Inchiquin’s Protestant officers made terms with
Cromwell. On the other hand, the Ulster army of Owen Roe stood no longer
neutral, and though Owen Roe himself died in November, 1649, his Celtic
soldiers fought for the freedom of their race with unsurpassable courage
and devotion. Owen’s nephew, Hugh O’Neill, defended Clonmel against
Cromwell, and repulsed with enormous loss his attempt to storm it. The
Ironsides confessed that they had found in Clonmel “the stoutest enemy
this army had ever met in Ireland,” but though the garrison escaped by a
skilful night march, the town itself was obliged to surrender (May 10,
1650).
By this time war between England and Scotland was imminent. Cromwell’s
recall had been voted by the Parliament in January, and a fortnight
after the fall of Clonmel he sailed for England, leaving his
lieutenants to complete the conquest of Ireland. Ireton, who remained
as President of Munster and commander-in-chief, captured Waterford
(August 10th), but failed before Limerick, while Coote in the north
defeated Owen Roe’s old army at Scarrifholis (June 21st). There was no
longer any Irish army in the field, and the war became a war of sieges
and forays. At the end of 1650, Ormond left Ireland in despair. His
successor, Clanricarde,—distrusted and disobeyed as Ormond had
been,—could neither unite the Irish factions for the last struggle,
nor combine the scattered bands who still held out in their bogs and
mountains. The nobility still clung to the House of Stuart, but the
clergy turned for help to the Catholic powers, and offered to accept
the Duke of Lorraine as Protector of the Irish nation, if he would
come to their defence with his army. In June, 1651, Ireton again
besieged Limerick, and after a siege of five months the city yielded
to famine and treachery. Ireton himself died of plague fever in
November, 1651, but his successors, Ludlow and Fleetwood, completed
the subjugation of the country. Galway, the last city to resist,
surrendered to Coote in May, 1652. During the year, the last Irish
commanders capitulated, and their soldiers entered Spanish or French
service.
So ended the twelve years’ war. The contest had been unequal, but the
failure of the Irish to regain their independence was due not so much to
the greater strength and wealth of England, as to their own divisions.
As a contemporary Irish poet wrote:
“The Gael are being wasted, deeply wounded,
Subjugated, slain, extirpated,
By plague, by famine, by war, by persecution.
It was God’s justice not to free them,
They went not together hand in hand.”
Ireland was devastated from end to end, and a third of its population
had perished during the struggle. Plague and famine, said an English
officer, had swept away whole counties, and in some places “a man might
travel twenty or thirty miles, and not see a living creature, either
man, or beast, or bird.” “As for the poor commons,” said another, “the
sun never shined upon a nation so completely miserable.”
It was not very difficult for Cromwell and the English Republic to
subdue a divided nation, but the task which lay before them now was less
easy. It remained to effect a settlement which would secure order,
restore prosperity, prevent future rebellions, and extinguish the feuds
of race and creed. In the last years of the Republic and during the
Protectorate, first under Lord-Deputy Fleetwood and then under Henry
Cromwell, this reorganisation of Irish government and society was
carried out. The main lines of the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland had
been determined by the Long Parliament. In all essentials the
parliamentary policy towards Ireland was simply a return to the
traditional policy which, since the close of the Tudor period, all
English governments had more or less consistently pursued. Colonisation,
conversion, and the impartial administration of justice were the aims of
Cromwell just as they had been the aims of Strafford.
The basis of the settlement was therefore a great confiscation of Irish
land, and the substitution of English for Irish landowners. Parliament
had announced this policy in 1642, when it voted that two million five
hundred thousand acres of Irish land should be set aside for the
repayment of the “adventurers” who advanced money for the reconquest of
Ireland. The pay of the soldiers employed against the Irish and the
reimbursement of the merchants who supplied provisions and other
necessaries were provided for in this way. By 1653, the debt which the
Parliament owed these three classes of creditors amounted to over three
and a half millions. Accordingly, in August, 1652, Parliament passed an
Act confiscating the estates of all Catholic landholders who had taken
part in the rebellion. The leaders and originators were to lose all
their land, others two thirds, some one third, according to the degree
of their guilt. The rich Catholic burgesses of Waterford, Kilkenny, and
other large towns shared the same fate, but the Munster Protestants who
had revolted in 1648 were merely fined two years’ income. In 1653 it was
decreed that even those persons to whom a portion of their estates was
theoretically left should be transplanted to Connaught, and receive
there the proportion of land to which they were entitled. In most cases
they received inferior land, in some cases nothing, and in all cases the
removal entailed great suffering. Even a still more sweeping scheme for
the transplantation of all classes of native Irish was for a time under
consideration, but in the end few but landholders were actually
transplanted. Artificers and labourers were allowed to remain behind,
partly because their guilt was held to be less, partly because it was
difficult to remove them, and because their services were needed by the
new owners of the soil. Finally, the confiscated lands were surveyed,
divided into different classes, and distributed by lot amongst the
soldiers and the creditors of the government.
By 1656, the process was practically completed, and two thirds of the
land of Ireland had passed to its new owners.
Cromwell himself thoroughly approved of the principles of confiscation
and colonisation. “Was it not fit,” he asked, “to make their estates
defray the charges who had caused all the trouble?” “It were to be
wished,” he told Parliament when announcing his capture of Wexford,
“that an honest people would come to plant here.” Accordingly he wrote
to New England inviting “godly people and ministers” to leave their
homes in America and establish themselves in Ireland. But with the
details of the land settlement effected during his Protectorate,
Cromwell had little to do, though sometimes he intervened in favour of
persons harshly treated by the Irish government. Thus he saved Peregrine
Spenser, the grandson of the poet, from transplantation, not for the
sake of the _Faery Queene_, but for the sake of Edmund Spenser’s
_Dialogue on the State of Ireland_. Moreover, it was largely due to the
Protector that the scheme for universal transplantation was reduced to
more moderate limits.
The ecclesiastical policy of Cromwell and the Puritans was the
traditional English policy of suppressing Catholicism in Ireland and
propagating Protestantism. The difference consisted in the consistent
vigour with which that policy was now pursued. Under the Stuarts the
laws had forbidden the Catholic worship, but the government had often
connived at its exercise. Charles, in his struggle with the Parliament,
had promised the Catholics at one time toleration, at another equal
rights. Cromwell, as soon as he arrived in Ireland, announced that the
old laws would be rigidly enforced. Catholicism, he declared, had no
right to exist in Ireland at all, the priests were mere intruders; for
their own ends they had instigated the rebellion; they poisoned the
flocks they professed to feed with their “false, abominable,
anti-Christian doctrine and practices.” Liberty of conscience, in the
narrowest sense of the word, Irish Catholics might enjoy, for they were
not to be forced to attend Protestant churches, but of liberty of
worship they were to have none. “I meddle not with any man’s
conscience,” wrote Cromwell to the Governor of Ross. “But if by liberty
of conscience, you mean a liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best
to exercise plain dealing and to let you know where the Parliament of
England have power, that will not be allowed of.” “As for the people,”
he declared, “what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their
own breasts I cannot reach, but shall think it my duty, if they walk
honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suffer for the
same.” Under the Protector’s government, therefore, priests were hunted
down, and either imprisoned or exiled. Some were transported to Spain,
others shipped off to Barbadoes, and a sort of penal settlement was
established in the island of Innis-boffin.
From persistency in these repressive measures, and from the active
preaching of Protestantism, Cromwell hoped for the conversion of the
Irish. He thought he saw signs of it even during his campaign. “We find
the people,” he wrote, “very greedy after the word, and flocking to
Christian meetings, much of that prejudice which lies upon people in
England being a stranger to their minds. I mind you the rather of this
because it is a sweet symptom if not an earnest of the good we expect.”
During the Protectorate, the English governors of Ireland made great
efforts to propagate Protestantism. Independent congregations were
founded in most of the great towns, and preachers invited over. In 1654,
the commissioners in whose hands the government was, appealed to New
England for ministers. “Sir,” began one of their letters, “we being
destitute of helpers to carry on the work of the Lord in holding forth
the gospel of Christ in this poor nation, being informed that the Lord
hath made you faithful and able in the work, we hereby desire you to
come over and help us.”
“Assiduous preaching,” argued Cromwell, “together with humanity, good
life, equal and honest dealing with men of different opinion,” would in
the end convert the Irish to Protestantism. The government also hoped
much from the spread of education. In 1650, Parliament endowed Trinity
College with the lands of the Archbishopric of Dublin and the Dean and
Chapter of St. Patrick’s. Trinity was reorganised and filled with
Independent divines, while the appointment of a number of professors,
the establishment of a public library, and the foundation of a second
college were also projected. When Archbishop Ussher died, the officers
of the Irish army bought his books to be the nucleus of the intended
library.
Like Strafford, Cromwell believed that the impartial administration of
justice would make the Irish people good subjects and attach them to
English rule.
“We have a great opportunity,” he wrote, “to set up a way of doing
justice amongst these poor people, which, for the uprightness and
cheapness of it may exceedingly gain upon them, who have been
accustomed to as much injustice, tyranny, and oppression from their
landlords, the great men, and those that should have done them
right, as I believe any people in that which we call Christendom....
If justice were freely and impartially administered here, the
foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the
more glorious and beautiful, and draw more hearts after it.”
In the newly conquered country the obstacles which made the reform of
the Law so difficult in England, could more easily be overcome.
“Ireland,” Cromwell said, “was as a clean paper, and capable of being
governed by such laws as should be found most agreeable to justice;
which may be so impartially administered as to be a good precedent even
to England itself.”
Some improvement in these respects there certainly was. The Irish judges
appointed by Cromwell were capable and honest, and one of the
chief-justices, John Cooke, was a zealous law-reformer. But no
improvement in the administration of the laws could reconcile Irishmen
to English rule while the laws themselves were so little “agreeable to
justice.” Justice combined with forfeiture and proscription, and without
equal laws, was a legal fiction which had no healing virtue.
Equally futile was the attempted conversion of the Irish. The struggle
against England had made Irish nationality and Catholicism identical
terms, and a faith associated with spoliation and foreign conquest could
make no progress in the hearts of the conquered. The only permanent
result of Cromwell’s zeal was an increase in the number of Protestant
Nonconformists in Ireland. Some nominal converts from Catholicism were
made. A few landowners professed themselves Protestants in order to
obtain a temporary respite from transplantation, and a good many Irish
women who had married English soldiers passed as Protestants in order to
elude the laws against the intermarriage of soldiers and papists. But
converts of this kind usually relapsed, and the mixture of the two
races, which the government could not prevent, profited Catholicism, not
Protestantism. The failure of the policy of conversion entailed the
partial failure of the policy of colonisation as well. The families of
the greater landowners established by the confiscations remained English
and Protestant. The families of the smaller landowners—of the
ex-soldiers who became yeomen and small farmers—tended to become
Catholic in creed and Irish in feeling. “How many there are,” lamented a
pamphleteer in 1697, “of the children of Oliver’s soldiers in Ireland
who cannot speak one word of English. This comes of marrying Irish women
instead of English.”
In the main, Cromwell’s Irish policy followed the lines which Tudor and
Stuart statesmen had laid down. In one respect, however, he was more
original and more enlightened than either his predecessors or his
successors. Strafford’s economic policy had aimed at making the Irish
rich, but also at keeping Ireland economically subject to England and
preventing Irish manufactures or products from competing with those of
England. No such jealousy of Irish trade warped Cromwell’s policy. Its
fundamental principle was that the English colony were to be regarded
simply as Englishmen living in Ireland, and entitled to the same rights
as Englishmen living in England. “I would not,” said a speaker in the
Parliament of 1657, “have our own people oppressed because they live in
Ireland.” Accordingly, in the levy of any general tax on the three
countries, care was taken that their respective shares should be
equitably assessed. The same customs and excise were paid in Ireland as
in England, and Ireland enjoyed equal rights with regard to foreign and
colonial trade. However, as the native Irish and the Catholics were
excluded from the corporate towns which were the seats of commerce and
manufactures, the benefit of this trade was almost exclusively reaped by
the English colony. Cromwell’s object was to secure the prosperity of
what he called “the interest of England newly begun to be planted in
Ireland.” If it were overtaxed, or in any other way overburdened, “the
English planters must quit the country,” and then, as he warned his
second Parliament, “that which hath been the success of so much blood
and treasure, to get that country into your hands, what can become of
it, but that the English must needs run away for pure beggary, and the
Irish must possess the country again?”
With free trade, Cromwell also gave the English colonists in Ireland
representation in the Parliament of the Three Nations. The Long
Parliament had projected the legislative union of England, Scotland, and
Ireland, and had fixed the number of their representatives, but it was
left to Cromwell to call the first united Parliament. The “Instrument of
Government” allotted Ireland thirty members, leaving the Protector to
fix the particular constituencies by which these members were to be
returned, and thirty representatives of Ireland sat accordingly in the
Parliaments of 1654, 1656, and 1659. As Catholics and persons who had
taken part in the rebellion were excluded from voting, the members for
Ireland consisted entirely of officers and officials representing the
English colony. “I am not here,” said one of them in 1659, “to speak for
Ireland, but for the English in Ireland.”
Outside the ranks of the new colonists, the union of the English and
Irish Parliaments found few cordial supporters. The older English colony
preferred a separate Parliament for Ireland. It would be impossible,
argued one of their spokesmen in 1659, for the Irish to get their
grievances redressed, if they had to come over to England and apply to
the English Parliament for the purpose. “I pray that they may have some
to hear their grievances in their own nation, seeing they cannot have
them heard here.” In 1659, the republican opposition in Richard
Cromwell’s Parliament, moved largely by the fact that the Irish members
were staunch Cromwellians, urged their exclusion from the House.
Ireland, Vane argued, was only a province, and had no right to a voice
in the government of the mother country. “They are still in the state of
a province, and you make them a power not only to make laws for
themselves, but for this nation; nay, to have a casting vote for aught I
know in all your laws.” The attempted exclusion of the members from
Ireland failed in 1659, but at the Restoration, the legislative union
with Ireland was the first thing to go. No law was required to repeal
it, for it had never received the King’s assent, and no voice was raised
in its defence. English conservatism and Irish provincialism were too
strong, and Cromwell’s imperial scheme went to the limbo reserved for
policies too wise for their generation.
The natural consequence of the termination of the legislative union was
the loss of the commercial equality which had accompanied it. The
English colonists were no longer treated as Englishmen domiciled in
Ireland, but as strangers and rivals. The Navigation Act of Charles II.
excluded them from American and colonial trade, while two other acts
followed, prohibiting the export of Irish cattle and provisions to
England. Finally, in the reign of William III. the Irish woollen
manufacture was destroyed, and the ruin of Irish commerce and
agriculture was completed.
It was only Cromwell’s policy towards the English colony in Ireland
which was reversed; his policy towards the native Irish was still
pursued. So far as his policy coincided with the traditional policy of
England towards Ireland it was maintained; so far as it was wiser and
more original it was abandoned. Carlyle draws a picture of Ireland as it
might have been if the “ever blessed restoration” had not “torn up”
Cromwell’s system “by the roots.” “Ireland under this arrangement,” he
holds, “would probably have grown up into a sober, diligent,
drab-coloured population, developing itself most probably into some sort
of Calvinistic Protestantism.” It is a baseless dream. Even in
Cromwell’s lifetime it was evident that his scheme for the conversion of
the Irish was doomed to failure. After his death the proscription of
Catholicism and the hopeless attempt to force Protestantism on a
reluctant people were still continued, nor were they abandoned till
1829. The new proprietors whom Cromwell had established still kept their
hold, and only a very small proportion of the confiscated
estates—nominally one third, in reality much less—returned to their old
possessors at the Restoration. So the Cromwellian land settlement
survived its author, to be his most permanent monument, and to be also,
as Mr. Lecky writes, “the foundation of that deep and lasting division
between the proprietary and the tenants which is the chief cause of the
political and social evils of Ireland.”
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