[551] Carte, 222 et post; Leland, 420 et post.
[552] Carte, 258-316; Leland, 431 et post.
[553] The statements of lands forfeited and restored, under the execution of the act of settlement, are not the same in all writers. Sir William Petty estimates the superficies of Ireland at 10,500,000 Irish acres (being to the English measure nearly as eight to thirteen), whereof 7,500,000 are of good land, the rest being moor, bog, and lake. In 1641, the estates of the protestant owners and of the church were about one-third of these cultivable lands, those of catholics two-thirds. The whole of the latter were seized or sequestered by Cromwell and the parliament. After summing up the allotments made by the commissioners under the act of settlement, he concludes that, in 1672, the English, protestants, and church have 5,140,000 acres, and the papists nearly half as much. Political Anatomy of Ireland, C. 1. In Lord Orrery's Letters, i. 187 et post, is a statement, which seems not altogether to tally with Sir William Petty's; nor is that of the latter clear and consistent in all its computations. Lawrence, author of "The Interest of Ireland Stated," a treatise published in 1682, says, "Of 10,868,949 acres, returned by the last survey of Ireland, the Irish papists are possessed but of 2,041,108 acres, which is but a small matter above the fifth part of the whole."—Part ii. p. 48. But, as it is evidently below one-fifth, there must be some mistake. I suspect that in one of these sums he reckoned the whole extent, and in the other only cultivable lands. Lord Clare, in his celebrated speech on the Union, greatly over-rates the confiscations.
Petty calculates that above 500,000 of the Irish "perished and were wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship, and banishment, between the 23rd day of October 1641, and the same day 1652;" and conceives the population of the island in 1641 to have been nearly 1,500,000, including protestants. But his conjectures are prodigiously vague.
[554] Petty is as ill satisfied with the restoration of lands to the Irish, as they could be with the confiscations. "Of all that claimed innocency, seven in eight obtained it. The restored persons have more than what was their own in 1641, by at least one-fifth. Of those adjudged innocents, not one in twenty were really so."
[555] Carte, ii. 414 et post; Leland, 458 et post.
[556] Leland, 493 et post; Mazure, Hist. de la Révolut. ii. 113.
[557] M. Mazure has brought this remarkable fact to light. Bonrepos, a French emissary in England, was authorised by his court to proceed in a negotiation with Tyrconnel for the separation of the two islands, in case that a protestant should succeed to the crown of England. He had accordingly a private interview with a confidential agent of the lord lieutenant at Chester, in the month of October 1687. Tyrconnel undertook that in less than a year everything should be prepared. Id. ii. 281, 288; iii. 430.
[558] Leland, 537. This seems to rest on the authority of Leslie, which is by no means good. Some letters of Barillon in 1687 show that James had intended the repeal of the act of settlement. Dalrymple, 257, 263.
[559] See the articles at length in Leland, 619. Those who argue from the treaty of Limerick against any political disabilities subsisting at present do injury to a good cause [1827].