Plantations of Ireland - Cromwellian Land Confiscation (1652)

Cromwellian Land Confiscation (1652)

The Irish Confederates had pinned their hopes on Royalist victory in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, so that they could cite their loyalty to Charles I and force him into accepting their demands - including toleration for Catholicism, Irish self-government and an end to the Plantation policy. However, Charles’ Royalists were defeated in the English Civil War by the Parliamentarians, who committed themselves to re-conquering Ireland and punishing those responsible for the rebellion of 1641. In 1649, Cromwell landed in Ireland with the New Model Army and by 1652, the conquest was all but complete. The English Parliament then published punitive terms of surrender for Catholics and Royalists in Ireland that included the mass confiscation of all Catholic owned land.

Cromwell held all Irish Catholics responsible for the rebellion of 1641 and said he would deal with them according to their "respective de-merits"- meaning sanctions varying from execution in worst cases, to partial land confiscation even for those who had taken no part in the wars. The Long Parliament had been committed to mass confiscation of land in Ireland since 1642, when it passed the Adventurers Act, which raised loans secured on the Irish rebels' lands that were to be confiscated. The Act of Settlement 1652 stated that anyone who had held arms against the Parliament would forfeit their lands and that even those who had not would lose three quarters of their lands – being compensated with some other lands in Connacht. In practice, those Protestants who had fought for the Royalists avoided confiscation by paying fines to the Commonwealth regime, but the Irish Catholic land-owning class was utterly destroyed. In some respects, what Cromwell had achieved was the logical conclusion of the plantation process.

The work was aided by the compilation of the Irish Civil Survey of 1654-5. The purpose of the survey was to secure information on the location, type, value and ownership of lands in the year 1641, before the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. In all twenty-seven counties were surveyed and a survey produced for each. The Down Survey of 1655-6 was a measured map survey, organised by Sir William Petty, of the lands confiscated.

Over 12,000 veterans of the New Model Army were given land in Ireland in place of their wages, which the Commonwealth was unable to pay. Many of these sold their land grants to other Protestants rather than settle in war-ravaged Ireland, but 7,500 soldiers did remain in the country. They were required to keep their weapons to act as a reserve militia in case of future rebellions. Taken together with the Merchant Adventurers, probably over 10,000 Parliamentarians settled in Ireland after the civil wars. Most of these were single men however and many of them married Irish women (although banned by law from doing so). Some of the Cromwellian soldiers therefore became integrated into Irish Catholic society. In addition to the Parliamentarians, thousands of Scottish Covenanter soldiers, who had been stationed in Ulster during the war settled there permanently after its end.

Some Parliamentarians had argued that all the Irish should be deported to west of the Shannon and replaced with English settlers. However, this would have required hundreds of thousands of English settlers willing to come to Ireland and such numbers of aspirant settlers just did not exist. Therefore, what actually happened was that a land-owning class of British Protestants was created, ruling over Irish Catholic tenants. A minority of the "Cromwellian" landowners were actually Parliamentarian soldiers or creditors. Most of them were pre-war Protestant settlers, who took the opportunity to attain confiscated lands. Before the wars, Catholics had owned 60% of the land in Ireland. During the Commonwealth period Catholic landownership fell to 8-9% and after some restitution in the Restoration Act of Settlement 1662, it rose to 20% again.

In Ulster, the Cromwellian period eliminated those native landowners who had survived the Ulster plantation. In Munster and Leinster, the mass confiscation of Catholic owned land after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, meant that English Protestants acquired almost all of the land holdings for the first time. In addition, some 12,000 Irish people were sold into slavery under the Commonwealth regime and another 34,000 went into exile, mostly in France or Spain.

Recent research has shown that although the native Irish land-owning class was subordinated in this period, it never totally disappeared, many of its members finding niches for themselves in trade or as chief tenants on their families’ ancestral lands.

Read more about this topic:  Plantations Of Ireland

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