English power in Ireland rooted, grew, and flourished, and propagated no end of internal troubles, which are to this day, if we are to believe all that we see and hear, the cause of much of Ireland’s unrest.
During four centuries Ireland was visited by but three English sovereigns, Henry II., John, and Richard II., and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries English influences gradually declined, reaching their lowest ebb at the time of Henry VII. The Reformation, under Henry VIII., took place in 1536, and was in all respects the most remarkable era of Ireland’s history, and from that time on—until the events which rose out of the tenantry laws, and home rule, and their attendant and satellite conditions—her troubles have been solely a warfare more or less dependent upon religious influences and conditions.
Commencing with the seventeenth century, the population sprang forward with leaps and bounds. Its estimated growth for the succeeding two hundred years is as follows:
| 1652 | . . . | 850,000 |
| 1672 | . . . | 1,100,000 |
| 1712 | . . . | 2,099,094 |
| 1787 | . . . | 3,001,200 |
| 1792 | . . . | 4,088,226 |
| 1805 | . . . | 5,395,456 |
According to the old historians, there were anciently many divisions of Ireland, made at various times by the several petty kings and chiefs who had possession of them.
There is an element of uncertainty about all the information concerning these ancient political divisions; some, indeed, may have been purely apocryphal, hence writers have mostly contented themselves with defining and delimiting the more modern divisions of Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught.
These four great divisions were subdivided into thirty-two counties, 256 baronies, and 2,293 parishes.
The province of Ulster took in the northern part of the island, and extended from sea to sea. What has always rendered this province superior, in prosperity, to the rest of the island is its great industry of linen manufacture.
The province of Leinster, in which is situated Dublin, Wicklow, etc., has the sea only on the east. The writers of a century or more ago were prone to remark that here the inhabitants approached the nearest to English manners and customs, and with some truth this is so.
The province of Connaught, with the sea on its western boundary, containing the counties of Mayo, Galway, and Sligo, through the city of Galway early arrived at a commercial prominence which later eras have not sustained.