The New Irish Constitution: An Exposition and Some Arguments by J. H. Morgan
Contents: Introduction — The new Constitution — A historical argument — Contemporary views.
…how to pacify a conquered country. Four years later Tyrone and Tyrconnell fled to Spain; the claims of their natural successors were set aside; and their lands were divided among the Scottish and English founders of modern Ulster. Thousands of natives, however, remained as tenants on the land of which they had been robbed, “hoping,” wrote the Lord-Deputy, “at one time or other to find an opportunity of cutting their landlords’ throats.” The unique character and the success of the Ulster plantation were due less to the original planters than to the Calvinistic Scots who found there a refuge from Laud and the Stuarts, and like the Pilgrim Fathers regarded themselves as a people chosen to root out the Amalekite and Philistine natives. Like the founders of New pg 261 England, too, their relations with the natives were far worse than those of the southern planters in Ireland, and the southern planters in North America. Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and wreaked on their landlords, in the massacre of 1641, vengeance for a generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots, English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell repaid the massacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More than two-thirds of Irish land had now passed into the hands of Englishmen; and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet the new expropriation was followed in 1689-90 by yet another…
