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.