Page 211 - Demo

Chapter Seven 211 rewarded by being granted all the lands of Innishowen (218,500 acres) as well as
other vast tracts.
3. The smallest lots went to the “natives,” mostly former owners, who paid heavier rents than the others-despite having smaller allotments. In all, the natives got only 58,000 acres of the poorest land.
Large grants of the rich Fertile Lands were also made to the London City Guilds, and similar tracts were reserved for the Crown, for Trinity College, Dublin, for bishoprics, glebes, and the building of free Royal schools of the Established Church, as well as for corporate towns and forts.
The token protests of the impotent, largely unarmed and leaderless Irish against these injustices were quickly and easily brushed aside, and consequently, many of the expelled Irish aristocracy, the ‘Swordsmen,’ sought military service abroad; others took to the woods and mountains among the snipe and badgers and became Rapparees or “Tories,” as the English named them.
The mass of the Irish became labourers and ‘tenants-at-will’ of the new landlords, many of whom were not desirable individuals. One of the aforementioned settlers wrote of his peers saying:
“From Scotland came many and from England not a few, yet all of them generally the scum of both nations, who, from debt or breaking or leeing from justice came hither hoping to be without fear of man’ justice.”
Unsurprisingly, from the outset there was great enmity between planter and planted. The colonists showed nothing but hatred and contempt for the Irish, and the Irish, on their side, desiring revenge, reciprocated. Many of the planters, inding that the hostility of the dispossessed Irish made conditions untenable for them, soon returned to their own countries, and by 1622, the planted colony of Ulster had dwindled to a mere 8,000 families. But although it was a partial failure, the Plantation of Ulster was the foundation for further successful colonization later on.
Anxious to have Parliamentary sanction of the many changes made since the beginning of his reign, in 1613, James summoned an Irish Parliament -the irst time the Parliament had been convened since 1585. ‘Carefully packed and biddable,’ as one commentator re-