His son-in-law, Henry
Ireton, continued the campaign. He captured Waterford, then Athlone
and Portumna and finally attacked Limerick which surrendered after
a four-month siege. Ireton died in November 1651 and was replaced by
General Ludlow. Ludlow proceeded to break down the resistance of the
remaining garrisons. Galway was the last to surrender, in April 1652,
after which the rebellion was declared over. Government agents were employed to round
up beggars, widows and orphans to be transported to the sugar plantations
of the West Indies where they became servants and indentured slaves.
The Puritan Parliamentarians persecuted not only Catholics but Ulster
Presbyterians, members of the Church of Ireland and those of other
minority religions. Priests were hanged, exiled or transported to the
West Indies and Puritan preachers were brought over from England to
replace them.
Parliament was now faced with settling
its enormous debts. The English army in Ireland had not been paid for
18 months and the adventurers were demanding to be recompensed. The adventurers
were so called because they lent or adventured money to parliament, a
decade earlier, in response to an act called the Adventurers’ Act.
They were members of Parliament, merchants and tradesmen. Cromwell himself
was one; he advanced £600. The money was required to raise an army
to subdue the rebels in Ireland. The adventurers were offered two and
a half million acres of Irish land, which was to be confiscated at the
end of the rebellion, as security of their money. Suppliers of provisions
and ammunition to the army also had to be paid. Irish land was to be used
to settle all these debts. The lands of the defeated Irish and Old English
Catholics were declared confiscated and preparations began for its distribution
to the various people to whom the government was indebted. In order to
facilitate the redistribution a survey of the land was begun.
THE SURVEYS
Part of the country, including Clare, had been surveyed during the 1630s
under Strafford. The Gross Survey was the initial undertaking in preparation
for the transplantation, very little is known about it. The
final and most important was the Down Survey carried out under the direction
of William Petty. It was so called because the information collected was
noted down on maps for the first time. The earlier surveys were merely
descriptive lists of the landscape and its features.
THE ACT FOR SETTLING IRELAND, 1652
The act for settling Ireland was passed
by the English parliament in August 1652. While the land was being
surveyed the government was deciding who should forfeit land. Degrees
of guilt were established and penalties defined. The result was that
owners of Irish land, whether they were Catholic, Protestant or Old
English were to suffer. Some were dispossessed totally; others forfeited
one fifth, one third, two thirds or three quarters of their land depending
on whether their part in the rebellion was a major or minor one. They
were to be recompensed from forfeited land west of the Shannon by an
area equal to the proportion they were entitled to retain. For example,
Donogh O’ Callaghan of County Cork forfeited three quarters of
his 12,000 acre estate.
He was assigned 3,000 acres in East
Clare in lieu of the proportion he was entitled to retain (he lost
all his Cork land). One of the Clare landowners who was forced to make
way for him was Donogh O’ Malony of Kilgorey who forfeited 166
acres and was assigned in turn, 41 acres in Kilseily parish nearby.
Some were dispossessed merely for being Catholic, while many Protestant
landowners who were considered to be less of a security risk, were
allowed to retain their land on payment of a heavy fine.
The province of Connacht and the
county of Clare were set aside for the habitation of the Irish where
they were to transplant themselves, their families, dependents, livestock
and goods before 1 May, 1654.’ The penalty for not transplanting
was death by hanging. Connacht and Clare were chosen as the area of
transplantation because they were surrounded by water, (the sea, the
Shannon, the Erne and the bogs of Leitrim) except for a ten mile stretch
of land which was to be protected by a series of forts. A one mile
strip, called The Mile Line, around the perimeter of Connacht and Clare
was reserved for military settlers ‘to confine the transplanted
and to cut them off from relief by sea.’ The Irish were forbidden
to live in the towns of Connacht. 500 acres around Clarecastle and
lands of ‘a mile compass’ around Carrigaholt and Leamaneh
were reversed for the English.
The resident landowners of Connacht and Clare also came within the category
of transplanter. They too had their holdings reduced and were often transplanted
from one parish to another. Some Clare landowners were transplanted to Galway,
Mayo and Roscommon. The native landowners regarded the transplanters from other
provinces as enemies and encouraged their followers to give them a rough reception.
Some of the principal landowners who were transplanted to Clare and their counties
of origin were:
Ellen Cheevers, Waterford; Marcus
Cransborough, Waterford; John Ryan, Tipperary; Col. Garret Fitzmaurice,
Kerry; James Bourke, Limerick; James D’arcy, Galway; Sir Valentine
Browne, Kerry; Donogh O’ Callaghan, Cork and Edward Butler, Kilkenny.
44,210 names were recorded on certificates of transplantation by 1
May, 1654.
There were three categories of transplanter;
proprietors, tenants and landless. The first were to have lands assigned
to them corresponding in quality to those they had left; the second
were to be assigned land as tenants of the state proportionate to the
number and kind of livestock they brought with them e.g. for each cow
three acres, for each horse four acres, etc.
The landless were to be allowed to settle
on state-owned land provided they were not within ten miles of the
Shannon, or they could remain where they were to become ‘hewers
of wood and drawers of water’ to the Cromwellian settlers. Ploughmen
and other skilled workers were excluded from the penalties of the act.
TRANSPLANTATION
The initial step taken by an Irish
landowner was to appear before delinquency courts where he was interrogated
about his political conduct over the previous ten years thus determining
his degree of guilt and the amount of land he was to forfeit. His local
revenue commissioner then issued him with a Transplanter’s Certificate, a licence
to cross the Shannon. The certificate gave a brief description of the
transplanter and those travelling with him, the type and number of
livestock and other goods he proposed to take with him. He then appeared
before commissioners in Loughrea who allotted him land in Clare or
Connacht on a temporary basis according to his entitlement. He would
have had to appear at court in Athlone a year or two later when he
would have been given permanent title to his Connacht or Clare land.
This was called his final settlement.
The
Government offered every facility to those who obeyed orders and moved
by the appointed day. The transplanters did not have to pay tolls for
their cattle, neither did they have to pay rent on their land until
their claims were finalised by the Athlone courts.
Some
of the dispossessed joined the Tories in the woods and hills. They
were outlawed by the Government but some of them were regarded as heroes
by the Irish. The landless Irish who did not transplant risked their
lives by giving the Tories food and shelter. They became a serious
menace to the new planters, raiding their land, attacking and killing
them. The Government offered large rewards for their capture so that
Tory hunting and Tory murder became common pursuits. Members of the
army were the first to be settled on the land vacated by the Irish,
followed by the adventurers. The last adventurer was settled on 1 May
1659 marking the end of the transplantation.
The
transplantation proved to be an enormous administrative problem. Acts
and orders were constantly being reversed and revised, members of the
army sold their debentures (documents entitling them to confiscated
land) against orders, the supply of land was insufficient to meet the
demands of those entitled to it culminating in what was officially
described as ‘frustration, fraud and injustice.’
RESTORATION
In May 1660, Charles II was restored to the thrones
of England, Scotland and Ireland to the great joy of the majority of
the people. Puritan rule had been extremely harsh. Catholics and others
were again allowed to practise their religion in peace. Under the Acts
of Settlement and Explanation the confiscation of Irish land decreed
by the Adventurers’ Act was confirmed but people who could prove
they were innocent of any part in the rebellion were to have their lands
restored. A Court of Claims was set up to hear their pleas and a small
number, mostly Old English, succeeded in being restored to their former
lands. Very few Irish had their lands restored because the courts were
abolished before their claims could be heard. The courts sat for only
eight months in 1663 during which they heard 829 of the 7/8000 claims
submitted. Although the Transplantation existed on paper it took so long
to get under way that by the time of the Restoration many people had
not moved and were restored to their old lands. Whether people moved
or not can only be discovered by detailed local investigation into the
history of various families.
A
new Ireland emerged after the Cromwellian Plantation. Land ownership
and political authority passed from the older inhabitants to the new
colonists, from Irish and Old English Catholics to a landed ascendancy
of English Protestants who were to control the life of Ireland until
the twentieth century
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Further Reading:
Prendergast, John P., The Cromwellian
Settlement of Ireland, Dublin (1922).
Dunlop, R., Ireland under the Commonwealth, Manchester (1913).
Simington, Robert C., The Transplantation to Connacht 1654-58,
Irish University Press (1970).
MacCurtain, Margaret, Tudor and Stuart Ireland, Dublin (1972).
Books of Survey and Distribution 1636 - 1703 :Vol. IV. Co.Clare
Irish MSS Comm. (1967).
McLysaght, Edward., A
Short Study of a Transplanted Family in the Seventeenth Century,
Dublin (1935).
Frost, James, The History and Topography of the County of Clare,
London 1893.
Berresford Ellis, Peter, Hell or Connacht, London 1975.
The
Books of Survey and Distribution contain a fascinating record
of the old Gaelic landowners, the quantity of land they forfeited and
the transplanters, both from Clare and across the Shannon, to whom it
was granted under the Restoration land settlement.This
is a copy of a page from the Clare book. It shows the owners of land in
the townlands of the parish of Killno in the barony of Tulla. On the left
is the landowner in 1641 before the Cromwellian confiscation and transplantation.
On the right hand side appears the transplanted either from Clare or from
another province. In between is the townland, with a description of the
land and the number of acres and then the quantity of that land granted
to the newcomer.
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