# Confiscation in Irish history/Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII
THE RESULTS OF CONFISCATION
To sum up the story of Irish confiscation. At the accession of Henry VIII. about two-thirds of the island was still in possession of the native race. But these lands were held in defiance of the_law, which looked on the Irish as alien enemies. The legal ownership of the greater part of the lands held by them was vested in the descendants of the Anglo-Norman barons among whom the island had been parcelled out in the thirteenth century, or had come to the Crown as the heir to the immense Mortimer estate.
As regards the remaining third held by the descendants of the settlers, here too a certain amount, notably in Connaught, had come to the Crown through the Mortimers.
Henry seems to have realised the inconveniences of this state of affairs; his policy appears to have been to enfranchise the Irish, and to settle the land on the basis of giving a legal title to the actual occupier. On his death there was a short reversion to the older policy of conquest and extirpation. But Elizabeth, as far as she had a fixed policy, followed on the lines of her father.
These lines, however, involved a breaking down of the old clan organisation, and the substitution of English law for the Brehon law. Above all they ​involved the destruction of the independence of the chiefs and of the clans. The religious innovations of her reign, and the attempts to force a people to give up its own customs and its own civilisation, even though these involved a state of constant strife which to us appears intolerable, led to constant resistance to her authority. This resistance, in turn, led to confiscation, though on a far smaller scale than is generally believed.
With the Stuarts a new era opens. Confiscation by legal subtleties succeeds to confiscation based on force of arms. The confiscations carried out under James and planned, if not carried out, under his successor took place in a time of profound peace. Elizabeth had not differentiated between Celt and Anglo-Norman. Though much of the confiscated land was given to Englishmen much also was granted to members of the native race or to families long settled in the island. Catholics were not shut out from her grants; indeed of many of the planter families established in her reign it would be difficult to specify the religion. English Catholics often settled in Ireland to enjoy a greater freedom of worship than they had at home, and this settlement was, it would seem, actually encouraged by the government.
But under James all is changed. His confiscations were carried out at the expense of the old Irish; his colonists were almost all British; they were exclusively Protestant. No Catholic and no "mere Irishman" could acquire any lands once ​set out to colonists. To the two elements of the population the Celtic or "mere Irish" and the Anglo-Norman or "old English," whom we may now begin to call the Anglo-Irish, had been added under Elizabeth a third element the new English. This was strengthened under James; kept apart as far as possible by a system of dense colonisation from the older elements; was strongly differentiated from them by religion. The religious opinions of many of the Elizabethan settlers were, as I have said, not very definite. This was the case with a very large proportion of the English nation at the time. But under James Puritanism had made strides, High Church Anglicanism had developed and grown definitely apart from Rome, the Scots in the north added a strong fanatical element.
A common religion, common disabilities began to draw the two older elements together. The conscious idea of a nation begins to appear. But the test of nationality becomes almost a religious one. The descendant of the planter of Leix or the undertaker of Munster, if a Catholic, begins to be classed as an Irishman. The Protestant heirs of Brian of the Tributes feel and speak as Englishmen.
By the year 1641 we find somewhat more than half the island still in possession of Catholics, some of them the descendants of planters of the previous generation. Against these last we must set the few great men of the two older elements who had embraced the new doctrines. Perhaps we may calculate that in 1641 three-fifths of the island belonged to the descendants of the owners ​of a century before; the remainder to colonists planted on confiscated lands. Then comes the great upheaval of 1641. Old Irish and old English combine for the first time in opposition to the newcomers.
All the lands in possession of Catholics were confiscated under Cromwell, except those of the few who were able to prove "constant good affection" to the parliament of England. But to certain classes he set out lands west of the Shannon estimated at about one and a half million English acres at the outside, or something under one-thirteenth of the whole area. By fraud, by force, or by sale at nominal prices, a large portion of this passed into the hands of Cromwell's supporters. In 1664 the Irish agents asserted that there were still one hundred and fifty-six thousand (Irish?) acres due but not yet set out to transplanted persons.
The remainder of the confiscated land was divided amongst his supporters, largely among the soldiers who had fought in, and the "Adventurers" who had subscribed money for the conquest of Ireland.
The Restoration upset this state of affairs. The Catholics retained what had been set out to them in Connaught, and the fortunate few among them recovered a certain amount of what they had lost. How much is a disputed point. The highest estimate, Petty's, asserts that the Catholics ultimately under Charles II. possessed one-third of the ​island. I have given, elsewhere, reasons for believing that this estimate is greatly in excess of the truth: it is possible that instead of a third, they held a seventh or even only an eighth. Whatever they actually held at Charles's death, it is certain that by the confiscation that followed on the downfall of James the Catholics lost about a million and a half English acres of "profitable" land. The Cromwellian and the Williamite confiscations, like those of Elizabeth, had fallen on Irish and Anglo-Irish alike. Among the victims too were to be found many whose ancestors had first settled as colonists of forfeited lands under Mary, or Elizabeth, or even James. A common misfortune had welded all these into one race.
When the Court of Claims set up under the Resumption Act had done its work it is doubtful whether as much as one-twentieth of the soil of Ireland remained in the hands of Catholics. If we add to this the area held by those great lords of the old race who had embraced Protestantism we shall get the whole amount held in 1703 by the descendants of those who a century and a half before had held the whole island. The remainder had been confiscated, some of it twice over.
The object of the penal laws of the eighteenth century was to secure that the area still owned by Catholics should never be increased, and should be as far as possible diminished. These laws succeeded but too well in their object. At the end of the seventeenth century while, chiefly by the ​operation of the Court of Wards, several of the great houses, Ormond and Kildare, Thomond and Barrymore, Kerry and Howth and Inchiquin—to name the most prominent—had conformed to the Established Church, yet the great bulk of the nobility and gentry, both old Irish and old English, had remained faithful to Rome.
In the eighteenth century the bolder spirits emigrated; of those landowners who remained behind sooner or later the great majority accepted the dominant Creed. Antrim and Clanrickard, the later house of Ormond, the five lesser peers of the Butlers, the O'Neills of Clandeboy, the Mac Carthy Mors, the Mac Morrough Kavanaghs are some of the outstanding names. It is curious that among the few who held to the older faith are three or four of the "lords of the Pale" and the "undertaker" family of the Brownes of Killarney, Earls of Kenmare.
After seventy years the rigour of the laws was relaxed. Catholics were allowed first to acquire lands on lease, and finally full rights to the acquisition of landed property. Yet when Wakefield wrote his Account of Ireland in 1811 or 1812 he found seven counties with not a single considerable Catholic landed proprietor, among them being Clare. In twenty-one other counties he finds something over sixty: and he says that in Galway one-third, in Kerry one-fourth, and in ​Cork one-tenth of the total area was in the hands of Catholics.
In considering the effects of confiscation in Ireland it is important to remember that except at the Plantation of Ulster there was no removal of the actual tillers of the soil. The vast majority of this class had had under the clan system only a semi-servile status. Under the lords of Anglo-Norman descent the lot of the "churls" was little better. It is quite probable, if not actually certain, that the lot of the tillers of the soil was actually improved—except in the case of Ulster—when the free clansmen, the ruling aristocracy, lost their lands.
We must be careful, of course, to except from this statement the poorer clansmen who held but ​small shares of the clan lands, and who, as I have pointed out, in many districts such as Wexford, Carbery in Cork, and west of the Shannon, formed a veritable peasant proprietary. Many of this class no doubt actually cultivated the soil; and this class suffered grieviously in the plantations under James, and practically ceased to exist after the Cromwellian confiscation.
We are constantly told that the lands of the peasants were first, by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, handed over to the chiefs, and were then confiscated from these latter. This is true, as we have seen, of a part of Ulster, and of some other districts; but it is untrue of the island in general. The "churls," "nativi," or whatever we may call the unfree classes, never had any property in the lands of the clan; and of the lesser free clansmen who had such property very large numbers retained it until dispossessed by Cromwell.
But if, in the seventeenth century, the earth-tillers actually benefited by the confiscations, the eighteenth century saw a great deterioration in their position. Up to the epoch of the penal laws the State had attempted to secure some fixity of tenure for those who actually cultivated the soil. All the various plantation schemes had rules providing that the planters should as far as possible let their lands only on lease; tenancy at will was discouraged. But with the beginning of the penal laws we find a complete change. The Irish Catholic tenant was shut out from any chance of ​securing fixity of tenure; and as Catholics formed nearly everywhere the mass of the population, this was equivalent to the introduction of tenancy at will, or at the most for short periods, over the whole island outside Ulster.
As a result of the various confiscations we find among the tenants, over and above the descendants of the original "churls" whose ancestors, as Bonn points out, had been serfs perhaps since the time of the Firbolgs, descendants of men who a few years before had owned land and ranked as gentry. A common misfortune drew the two elements together, and ultimately welded them into one. To this admixture Bonn ascribes the curious combination of servility and passionate fierceness which is a marked feature in the character of the Irish peasant.
The outstanding result of confiscation in Ireland was to establish an almost complete divorce between the owner and the tiller of the soil. There are other European countries, as for example, some of the lands under the rule of the Habsburgs, in which confiscation based on religions grounds was carried out during the seventeenth century in a manner almost as sweeping as in Ireland.
But in most of these the mass of the people had either never accepted the new doctrines, or, if they had, they soon returned to the older faith. And, with the one exception of Bohemia, there was nowhere such a difference in race and language between the new landowners and the old as there was in Ireland. In Styria and other Austrian ​provinces the new owners, if not German by race, soon adopted the language of their tenants; in a generation or two there was no racial difference felt. Above all the old social structure lived on in spite of confiscation.
In Bohemia, however, we find a close parallel to Ireland. There we find a revolt, based largely on religious motives, terminating in the complete conquest of the rebels after a struggle which is said to have reduced the population from 3,000,000 to 800,000. The victorious sovereign held that this rebellion and its repression had involved the loss of all the ancient rights and privileges of the nation. The lands of all rebels were confiscated. Going farther the Emperor Ferdinand decreed the expulsion from the country of all who did not submit to the Church of Rome, even if they had never resisted his authority. A delay of six months was given to the nobles to see whether they would conform. If they did not, they were allowed another six months within which to sell their estates. Count Lützow declares that more than half the landed property of Bohemia thus changed hands and that of the larger estates in the country only one hundred and forty-seven remained in the hands of their previous owners. The estates ​thus confiscated were divided amongst Germans, Spaniards, Walloons and Italians, and amongst the grantees, by a curious irony of fate, were to be found some Irishmen.
The new regime sought security by resting on the German element, already strong in all the towns and in some of the country districts. The German element, profoundly hostile to the Slav, had on that account kept apart from the religious innovations which had found such support among the native Czech race. There was a Catholic Ulster of German speakers firmly planted in the north-west portion of the kingdom. The German tongue with German culture rapidly became supreme under the patronage of the State.
In one respect, however, there is a profound difference between Bohemia and Ireland. The mass of the people deprived of their preachers and of an upper class belonging to the reformed religion, soon, under the unceasing labours of the Jesuits and other missionaries and under pressure from the State, reverted to Catholicity. According to Lützow, Bohemia presents the nearly unique case of a country which formerly almost entirely Protestant, has now become almost entirely Catholic.
Thus one great source of divergence was removed. But Lützow says: "Yet the evil seed of hatred and distrust sown by the oppressors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century bears evil fruit up to the present day. Bohemian peasants even now instinctively distrust the nobles of their country, even if they belong to their own race, and are in sympathy with the national cause."
​But in Ireland, even more than in Bohemia, and more than in any other western European country, there existed in the eighteenth century two peoples of whom one formed the dominant caste, separated from one another by barriers of race, of religion, and, for a time, of language.
The Baltic provinces of Russia occur to one as in some sort a parallel. As Ireland is the most westerly, so are these provinces the most easterly part of Europe where a dominant aristocracy of Germanic blood has brought an alien race under its power without either exterminating it or assimilating it. In Ireland the colonist is marked off from the native by race and religion, but the language of the former has been adopted by the latter. In the Baltic provinces the two elements are separate in race and in language, but the peasantry of Lettish or Esthonian blood has the same Lutheran religion as its masters. And both landowner and peasant have over them a foreign master differing from them both in race, in religion and in language.
"Local landownership and autonomy," said a Russian lecturer recently, "are almost entirely in the hands of the nobility, whereas at least 75 per cent, of the peasantry have till now remained landless. … The economic and legal privileges of the nobility naturally served as an inexhaustible source of discontent in the region and not infrequently led to undesirable excesses."
It seems then that there has been less fusion in the Baltic provinces than in Ireland. The barrier of language has been very great, and though ​religious discord, and disabilities arising from Creed have been absent, the legal and social system has shut out the mass of the original inhabitants from rising into the position of landed proprietors. Even the merchants of the cities and the culture of the University are predominantly German. How far apart the races still are was shown some ten years ago during the agrarian troubles, accompanied as they were by excesses on the part of the peasantry and by measures of repression on the part of the government which rivalled anything done in Ireland by either party in 1641 and 1642.
​In Ireland, in the eighteenth century there was, in spite of all conflicts, a certain amount of fusion. Of the upper classes a fairly large number adopted Protestantism, and so became identified with the ruling caste, while preserving a certain amount of sympathy with their Catholic kindred. The poorer among the colonists in many cases adopted the religion of the people among whom they dwelled. And for the mass of the people there was always the possibility of escape from all disabilities, and of a rise into the dominant caste provided only that they embraced the dominant religion. The history of families such as that of Hely Hutchinson, of O'Callaghan, Lord Lismore, and of Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, shows that such a rise into the governing classes was by no means uncommon.
There is one special feature of Irish social organisation, springing directly from the confiscations, to which Bonn draws attention. In scarcely any other country of Europe was the power of the landowner so absolute. It was not checked by any manorial system such as prevailed in England, nor by any communal system such as we find on the Continent. The Irish peasant stood alone in an individual relationship to the landlord. He had no rights based on immemorial custom, and strengthened by being enjoyed by an organised community. The German or Hungarian serf, the English manorial tenant formed part of a definite organisation, recognised by the law, possessing certain rights as against the landowner. The serf could not be dispossessed of his holding; it was therefore contrary to the interests of the lord to let ​him starve. The copy holder, and even the inferior tenants on the English manor, had certain rights of pasturage, etc. But in Ireland the wood, the turf bog, the mountain pastures belonged to the landlord. Each tenant dealt as an individual with the owner of the soil. He was personally free, for under James I. the last traces of serfdom had been abolished; but on the other hand, as a tenant at will he stood absolutely at the landlord's mercy. Different conditions, of course, prevailed in Ulster from the first, amongst the Protestant settlers, and in that province after bitter struggles the "Ulster custom" was recognised at least as regards Protestant tenants.
It is curious to find results such as these arising to a certain degree from the personal freedom of the Irish peasant; and it is worthy of remark that in Spain where serfdom never took root, almost the same unlimited power of the landlord existed as in Ireland.
As to the actual economic position of the mass of the population after the confiscations there is a certain conflict of evidence and of opinion. But when we consider the famines of the first half of the eighteenth century, one of which is said to have caused the death of 400,000 people, and when we read the accounts of the condition of the lower orders given by Swift, Berkeley and others, we are led to the conclusion that the economic condition of the peasantry was as bad if not worse than that of the French peasantry in the darkest days of the closing years of Louis XIV.
​Yet the picture is not one of unrelieved gloom. The large resident landlord population could not fail to develop a certain amount of sympathy for the lower orders with whom they were in daily contact. The lower orders often transferred to the new landowners some part of the attachment they had felt for their former chiefs. In particular a close bond often united those few of the old houses who had retained their lands with their tenants. And bad as the eighteenth century in Ireland was it does not perhaps after all compare so unfavourably with the same period in Continental countries. There was horrible cruelty and constant oppression, with on the other hand continual wild outbreaks on the part of the peasantry. Probably no other country could produce such a degraded type as the squireen or buckeen, the drunken, gambling, profligate descendant of the Cromwellian or Williamite settler. But if we look into the political status of the peasantry in the various German States, in France, and even in Swiss Cantons such as Protestant Bern and Catholic Luzern, we may come to the conclusion that in certain respects their lot was even harder than that of their contemporaries in Ireland.
Having traced the course of confiscation in Ireland, and seen some of its effects, one might be inclined to speculate a little on whether the twofold process of confiscation and colonisation has really been to the advantage of England. The examples of Scotland and Wales are perhaps a sufficient answer to the query. In one there were frequent rebellions; the other is a conquered ​country; but in neither has there been colonisation, and the land has remained to a great extent in possession of the native race.
The result is that, though in both there is a healthy national feeling, in neither can we discern any real hostility to England.
The two counties of Ireland which are most thoroughly British are Antrim and Down, where colonisation was founded, not on force or confiscation so much as on peaceful penetration.
Had a process of assimilation and peaceful penetration, such as Henry VIII. seems to have planned, gone on over the whole island, what might not have been the result? Irish unruliness, English religious innovations impeded this scheme, and led, as if inevitably, first to confiscation, and then to colonisation.
Experience has shown that the landed interest of a country, if not vexed in matters of conscience or in pocket, tends almost always to become the firmest support of the existing form of government. There seems no reason to believe that the spirit of loyalty to the person of the monarch which we find so marked among the Catholic nobles and gentry under the Stuarts would not have grown, and spread downward among the people, if unhampered by the constant vexatious interference of the State with both the conscience and the estates of all Catholics, until it finally became a feeling of attachment to existing institutions. ​With it might have come as in Scotland the gradual adoption of the language and ideals of England. But with confiscation and accompanying colonisation came the introduction of a new element, alien in blood, in religion, in ideals, bringing a disturbing factor into the nation's life, preventing the steady development among the older element of such a feeling of loyalty and of content with the regime finally set up under James I.
It is so hard for us nowadays to realise this spirit of loyalty, that modern writers often altogether overlook or deny its existence. But that it did exist, in spite of everything, among the bulk of the landowning classes the whole proceedings of the Confederate Catholics both clergy and laity from 1641 to 1652 shows. Their professions of devotion to the Crown appear to us moderns abject; but they redeemed their professions by the sacrifice of their lives and their property.
That the "new interest" prevailed at the Restoration, that the second Charles and the second James were persuaded that the interests of England demanded the sacrifice of the Irish did not shake their loyalty. But unluckily for them it was loyalty to a dynasty rejected by the majority of the British.
Every fresh confiscation had increased the number of those who, though they may have been loyal to the dynasty, were disaffected to the system by which that dynasty governed. The new dynasty had but little claim on the sympathies of the Irish Catholics, yet we find very soon an acceptance of the House of Hanover by practically all of them ​who had retained their lands. With but few exceptions it was the landless men who followed the path of the wild geese.
The penal laws aimed at keeping the Catholic interest in the depressed position in which the last confiscation had left it. It has often been said that these laws were provoked by if not modelled on the anti-Protestant enactments of Louis XIV. But the French penal laws stopped short at the Vosges. The Protestant noble or burgher or peasant of Alsace was not injured in pocket or in conscience by his foreign rulers. The result was that barely four generations had passed before Alsace, differing entirely in language, and largely in religion from France, yet had become one with her in sentiment. To the young Goethe Strassburg and the adjoining countryside appeared German in all outward characteristics and very largely so in mental ones. Yet nowhere in his account of his Strassburg days does he give any hint of the existence of any hostility to France, of any desire for reunion with Germany.
And in the same age an Irish peer. Viscount in Ireland, Count Taaffe in Austria could assert that neither was Protestantism any bar to advancement under Maria Theresa, nor Catholicism under her rival, Frederick the Great. And he drew the moral that it was not Ireland so much as England which suffered from the effect of the restrictive legislation in Ireland.
​Then, too, restrictive legislation lasted much longer in Ireland than in continental countries. Practically in no country in western Europe outside the British islands did a man's religious opinions shut him out from State employments after the opening of the nineteenth century.
Wakefield quotes from a speech of a Colonel O'Shee, no doubt a member of the old Kilkenny family of that name, who had commanded 3000 men in that Austrian army which had battled so stubbornly against Napoleon at Wagram. He told a Kilkenny audience that nowhere in the Austrian dominions, or in the various German States would a man's creed shut him out from military command. In the United Kingdom alone did a man's religion exclude him out from the service of his lawful sovereign.
It is not from the ranks of the old Irish gentry, whether of pure Irish or of Anglo-Norman descent, whether Protestants or Catholics, not from the Ormonds or Fingals, the Clanrickards or Inchiquins that the majority of the leaders of Irish national movements in later times have sprung. The direct descendant of that Brian Mac Phelim O'Neill, Lord of Clandeboy, who had been the victim of the treachery of the first Earl of Essex under Elizabeth, was, while fighting in the cause of George III., as Wakefield puts it, "basely murdered by a banditti of rebels who consisted chiefly of Presbyterians." The 26th Lord of Kerry, Marquess of Lansdowne, head of the Fitzmaurice family, descendant of some of the most obstinate rebels of Elizabeth's day, has more than once held some of the most important posts in the Empire.
​To turn to the other side of the picture, it was Protestant Ulster that overthrew the Stuarts. It was the Presbyterians of Ulster, driven from their homes by the mistaken religious and economic legislation of the 18th century who formed the backbone of the armies that put an end to the rule of England in what is now the United States. The independence of the Irish Parliament in the closing years of the 18th century was won by the colonists. The main strength of the United Irish movement was amongst the Protestants of the north.
Not all of these movements can be considered as being to the advantage of England. And during the nineteenth century it was the colonist element which produced Emmett, Davis, Butt, Biggar and Parnell.
Largely owing to the efforts of leaders sprung from this element the work of confiscation has been to a great extent undone in recent years. The land is passing back to the older race. Peasant proprietorship, so abhorrent to the theorists of the age of Elizabeth and James, utterly destroyed under the Commonwealth, is once more being set up. But at what a cost, and not of money only. What a waste of time, what a crop of ill-feeling, what a breach in the unity of the nation, what an expenditure of political energy which might so easily have been diverted into more profitable channels have marked the latest agrarian revolution in Ireland. It would perhaps have been better for England in the long run if this price had never had to be paid.
​From the Irish standpoint no judgment can yet be formed. Reading the lamentable record of successive confiscations the words of the great Florentine exile as from the glories of the heaven of Mars he turned his thoughts to the old days of Florence when those were great who now were but broken exiles and the great houses, now all undone, made Florence flower in all her noble deeds, will strike a responsive chord
"Oh happy they! each one to lay the head
In her own tomb, and no one yet compelled
To weep deserted in a lonely bed."
The sufferings of individuals, even of whole classes, from the effects of confiscation were greater perhaps than we can now conceive. In spite of some mitigating features, such as I have mentioned, the condition of the greater part of the population all through the eighteenth and for the greater part of the nineteenth century was indescribably wretched.
Yet, after all, two or three centuries are but a short span in the life of a people. In more than one country that space of time has seen a revolution in the ownership of land as sweeping as we have seen in Ireland. Even in peaceful England itself, owing to the working of economic causes, there are not many families who have held their property in the direct line since the days of Henry VIII.
"To hear how noble families decay
Will not appear a novel thing or strange
Since states and kingdoms also pass away,"
once more to quote Dante. ​Confiscation hit primarily the land-owning classes (a larger proportion, of course, of the total population in Ireland than in England); it was only its secondary effects that pressed hard on the great mass of the people. And wretched as was the condition of the tiller of the soil in the eighteenth century, may not his lot, and that of the smaller landowners actually have been worse, in some respects at least, under the constant feuds, the incessant raids which seem inseparable from the clan system? With colonisation came at least a more secure existence, the possibility of a higher standard of material comfort.
So in certain ways there has been a gain to the nation as a whole.
In the early part of the story of confiscation we have seen how frequently the colonist of one generation has in the next become the victim of a fresh confiscation. In this way the two races have to a certain extent mingled. And after the work of confiscation and colonisation was done there has, in spite of everything, been a certain amount of fusion, although on the whole it is the older element which has prevailed. The colonist has supplied a hardness, a sense of discipline, habits of sustained industry which were wanting to the Celtic character. He has gained a flexibility of mind and certain elements of sympathy and imagination in which the pure Teutonic race is singularly deficient. To confiscation and colonisation England owes a constant drain on her resources, a vulnerable point in her defences, a hostile sentiment with which in every crisis of her ​history she has had to reckon. On the other side are to be set untold sufferings, rivers of blood and tears; but in the long run, while we can see much loss, it may be possible also to see a not inconsiderable gain, not indeed to the landowning class, but to the people of Ireland.
* ↑ Thus the family of Grene, now widespread in Tipperary and the adjoining counties, came over to secure greater religious freedom.
* ↑ It must be remembered that of the area in the hands of colonists in 1641 much had been church lands, confiscated under the action of Henry VIII.'s laws.
* ↑ Bonn accepts Petty's figures, and holds that under William the third was reduced to a sixth. (Bonn, Vol. II., p. 158). Both these figures seem to me to be much too high.
* ↑ The head of the last-named family had only just "turned" when Wakefield wrote.According to Bonn, thirty-six landlords became Protestants between 1703 and 1709, and one hundred and fifty between 1709 and 1719. He quotes the Carte papers. Between 1703 and 1788 there were 4,800 converts. (Ibid, Vol. II., p. 176).
* ↑ In Kerry the immense Kenmare estate must have accounted for the greater part of the area held by Catholics. In Sligo there were no Catholic landlords of importance, and in Mayo only three or four. On the other hand he was disposed to think that the majority of personal property was in Catholic hands.
* ↑ Bonn quotes in this connection a curious statement from the Alethinologia of Lynch as to the "insolence" of the "agricolae" under Cromwell. There is also an 18th century poem by Eoghan O'Rahilly in which the poet sarcastically acclaims Cromwell as the noble chief of the clan of the churls. "The Thanksgiving of the jovial churl, his wife and family, during the time he had Oliver Cromwell as Protector." "As St. Patrick checked the cattle-plague For the children of Adam in Ireland So you have checked for us the week-day (work) And many unjust liabilities. I beseech that nor Kavanagh nor Byrne Nor Nolan, nor Kinsella Nor Rice nor Roche May get a sod of their ancestor's portion." I am indebted to Professor T. O'Donoghue of Cork for the above translation.
* ↑ Chapter I., Book V. of Bonn should be carefully read in this connection. In Chapter VII. of Book IV. he points out how yearly tenancy fitted in better with the ideas of the Irish: see pp. 145—146 of Vol. II.
* ↑ Jene Heftigkeit und Wildheit, die neben der Schmiegsamkeit eines der merkwurdigsten Kennzeichen der unterert Klassen Irlands ist. Vol. I., p. 389.
* ↑ In all the Alpine lands the existence of the communal organisation gave a certain amount of independence to the peasants. Many if not most of the communes owned and still own mountain pastures, forests, etc. A free peasantry, too, survived in many districts. There are still some Protestant communities in Styria and others of the Austrian lands.
* ↑ This is for the whole period of the Thirty Years' War 1618 to 1648.
* ↑ This at least is Lützow's account.
* ↑ No doubt much of the land that did not change hands belonged to the towns, the communes or the Church.
* ↑ Also in the extreme north.
* ↑ Times'' Russian Supplement, Oct. 30, 1915.
* ↑ If any of the native nobility preserved their lands they were fused so long ago with the conquering Teutonic "barons" that they now form only one caste. The same applies to any descendants of Danish and Sweedish nobility in these provinces.
* ↑ The following extract from the Times' Russian Supplement of December 17th, 1915, is interesting:— "The record of the atrocities in the Baltic provinces was published to the world in a proclamation, printed in six different languages, by the wronged and suffering people. It was but a foretaste of what other German Junkers perpetrated in Belgium last year. "A very curious German publication, published in 1883, also throws further light on the German attitude. It purports to be a correspondence between two German students, one of whom is visiting in Livonia and one in Ireland, and the comparison drawn between the two ancient kingdoms is, in the light of recent events, very instructive. The Irish peasantry are ruled by English landowners, the Letts by German ones. Where the Germans conquer, he says, they reorganize, and the people benefit. Where the English conquer, they sink to the level of the peasantry they misrule. 'Here,' says the writer proudly, 'peasants 300 years under the care of Germans come into their kingdom. Livonia's prosperity is the result of a healthy aristocracy, Ireland is the victim of a desolating robber system.' 'Dem Deutschen,' he proudly concludes, 'aber wurde Livland zur Heimat; j'y fiuis, j'y reste.'"
* ↑ See Bonn, Vol. II., pp. 177—179. In Ireland there seems to have been very little common land, such as we find in England.
* ↑ For which, however, a way was paved by Chichester's massacres.
* ↑ Swift, writing in 1725 says, according to Froude: "The Papists in general of any substance or estate, and the priests almost universally are what we call Whigs in the general sense of the term."