So ended the twelve years’ war. The contest had been unequal, but the failure of the Irish to regain their independence was due not so much to the greater strength and wealth of England, as to their own divisions. As a contemporary Irish poet wrote:
“The Gael are being wasted, deeply wounded, Subjugated, slain, extirpated, By plague, by famine, by war, by persecution. 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.