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212 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
ferred to it, the Parliament was convened with the object of securing a non-Catholic major- ity in the House of Commons in favour of the Crown, and to achieve this aim, it created forty new parliamentary boroughs, each returning two members: some of these boroughs contained only seven or eight inhabitants. The Parliament passed a formal Act of Attainder against O’Neill, O’Donnell, O’Doherty and others; it also passed an Act extending English Law over the whole of Ireland; and repealed existing laws which made distinctions as to race; and voted a subsidy for the King.
Moreover, James and the English adventurers were also anxious to prosecute the profit- able work of confiscation further. Accordingly, a Commission into Defective Titles was set up and a number of individuals known as “Discoverers” were employed to examine and find ‘faults and flaws’ in the titles by which the old landowners held their estates- history shows that the discovery of even a trivial imperfection in a title generally meant the loss of an estate. By these means large tracts of land were forcibly taken from their rightful owners and made available for plantation, notably the ancient patrimony of the MacMurroughs in and around Carlow and Wexford, and significant tracts in Longford, Leitrim, and Offaly.
In a short time, 385,000 acres in the midland counties and 66,000 acres in the south east were adjudged to the Crown. As can be imagined, this scurrilous policy of forcibly establish- ing English landlordism caused general outrage and the Irish were left believing that there now were no bounds to English greed and no protection in the law.
The Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, the two great instruments of tyr- anny in England, had their counterparts in Ireland: the Court of Castle Chamber and the Ecclesiastical High Commission Court. Manned by members of the Privy Council, these establishments had extraordinary powers. Another court, the Court of Wards, exercised the power “to bargain and sell the custody, wardship, and marriage of all the heirs of such persons of condition as died in the King’s homage,” added to which it also empowered the new Royal schools to educate youths, at pain of closure “in the English religion and habits.” When, in 1622, James appointed Sir William Parsons as Master of the Wards, the Catholic population felt further aggrieved and ostracized, because Parsons was a corrupt and abusive man of pronounced, hostile, and very public anti-Catholic leanings.
James 1 died in March 1625, and was succeeded by his son, Charles 1.
As referenced earlier, at this time Ireland was in a state of great distress and confusion; religious persecution and the fear of further inquisitions into the titles by which estates
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