The stage was now set for possibly the greatest dislocation in Irish history - the Cromwellian land settlements, which affected around 50 per cent of Ireland’s fertile acreage. Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland had cost around ?3.5 million; his subsequent land settlement was as much intended to clear this debt as to solve the Irish problem. Royalist and Confederate landowners (Protestants as well as Catholics, but mostly the latter) had their lands confiscated and 105 of the most prominent were executed, exiled or transported to the West Indies. Counties Dublin, Cork, Kildare and Wicklow were reserved for use by the government; ten others - Antrim, Down, Armagh, Meath, West Meath, Laois, Offaly, Waterford, Tipperary and Limerick - were allocated to some 1,500 adventurers (investors who had funded the Irish campaign) and nearly 35,000 veterans of the parliamentary army, who were given debentures (bonds) in lieu of back pay. It was intended that the new landowners would expel their Catholic Irish tenantry, who would be transplanted to Counties Mayo, Galway, Roscommon and Clare, and replace them with English Protestant tenants. Although the settlement resulted in a revolution in land ownership, it did not work out as planned. Ireland’s well-earned reputation for rebellion meant there was no influx of English settlers - England’s new colonies in North America and the West Indies were much more attractive prospects - and less than a third of the army veterans actually took possession of their lands: most sold out to the adventurers or Old Protestant landowners and went home. First and foremost, landowners wanted a return on their investments, so very few Catholic Irish tenants were actually expelled and most of those that were soon drifted back. Cromwell’s settlement certainly destroyed what was left of the native landowning class, but everywhere outside Ulster there remained a majority of Catholic Gaelic speakers.
Some Catholics did have their lands restored to them by Charles II after the Restoration but the Protestant ascendancy was confirmed by the
Williamite War (1689-91), which saw the Protestant William of Orange defeat the Catholic King James VII/II. The pattern of landownership that was to prevail until the later nineteenth century had been established - large estates owned by an English-speaking Protestant elite, tenanted (except in Ulster and the Pale) by a mainly Gaelic-speaking, Catholic peasantry. United, and equally disadvantaged, by their Catholicism, the old division, based on language, between the Gaels and the Old English began to blur and was replaced by a new division based on religion.
World History
