Thus the Cromwellian settlement meant the complete sweeping away of all Catholic landlords—old Irish, old English, new English—from all the counties east of the Shannon and from two of the six counties west of that river. But, it did not, as we have seen, involve the sweeping away of the mass of the inhabitants. These remained on, a despised but indispensable race, hewers of wood and drawers of water for their conquerors.
Such a clean sweep of the landowners of a whole country seems monstrous to us at the present day. But we must remember that the same generation had seen an almost equally clean sweep of the landlords from Bohemia, and from some of the Alpine provinces ruled by the Habsburgs, and that not so long before all Spain had applauded the expulsion from its shores of thousands of Catholic Christians, whose only crime was that in their veins was the taint real or alleged of Moorish blood.
The lands thus cleared of their owners were divided amongst two classes of colonists, adventurers and soldiers. The former, in 1642, had advanced to the government the sum of £360,000 for the purpose of putting down the Irish insurrection.
In return for this money they were promised by Act of Parliament an acre of land in Leinster for every 125. advanced, or one in Munster for every 8s., or one in Connaught for every 6s., or one in Ulster for every 4s. to be given them out of the estates of the insurgent Irish, as soon as the country was conquered. It must not be supposed that these sums represent the value of Irish land at that period. But the venture or adventure
