Page 231 - Demo

Chapter Seven 231 that one might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature. Man, beast
and bird were all dead, or had quit those desolate places.”
One recent academic study claims that the human misery visited on the Irish during the wars of the mid seventeenth century probably equaled anything inlicted on Poland and Russia in the 1940s by Nazi Germany.
The terms on which the various Irish armies surrendered permitted them “to transport themselves to any foreign state not in amity with the Parliament.” So it came to pass that some thirty thousand of the most active Irish ighters left to join the army of the King of Spain, 5,000 to the King of Poland, 3,500 to France, and smaller numbers to other coun- tries. Wives, children, and widows were left behind, and very soon agents and merchants acting on the approval of the authorities, had thousands of these unfortunates transported to the West Indies where they were put to work as indentured labourers, in conditions hardly better than slavery-some accounts claim as many as 50,000.
Coniscation and redistribution of land was then carried out on a scale far greater than anything up to then-in fact, more than half the territory of Ireland was forfeited. An Act of Settlement passed in August 1652 provided the basis for this. According to this Act, the Irish ‘Papists’ were classiied according to their “guilt” in the late rebellion. The country was to pay for its own conquest: its lands were to be used by the Government to pay all debts and reward all the services of its supporters.
The Act of Settlement further decreed that all ecclestiastical and crown property was to be coniscated. All those who had taken part in the rebellion prior to November 10, 1642, and 104 others specially named, were, if still alive to be executed and forfeit their lands- the list included, Ormond, Rory O’ Moore, and Murrough O’Brien. All landowners who had ever borne arms against the Parliament were to lose their estates-they were entitled to receive lands in Clare or Connacht, one-third the value of those they had forfeited. Those who had never taken up arms against the Parliament, but who yet had not shown “constant good afection” to it were to surrender their estates for lands two-thirds as valuable in Clare or Connacht.
For most of the war an enormous English army had been engaged in Ireland, an army that was not paid on a regular basis, so that by the end of the hostilities, many of the oicers and men were owed some one and a half million pounds.