had ultimately accepted the peace of 1648.[1] Such of them as had not explicitly done so had in many cases served the King abroad, and so might claim restoration as ensignmen.
Of the original movers in the rising of 1641 a very large number had surrendered to the Cromwellian government on articles which entitled them to a proportion of their estates west of the Shannon. In particular those Irish of the Leinster army who had laid down their arms in May, 1652, at Kilkenny, and who had ultimately been ordered one-third of their former estates in Connaught, included most of those lords of the Pale who had been foremost in the confederacy with the Ulster Irish in 1641.
Even the son of Lord Gormanston, the leader on whose head a price had been set in 1641, was one of the Nominees specially mentioned as to be restored.
As some thirty thousand Irish had taken service abroad, most of them under the King's ensigns, the restoration of the "Ensignmen" would have meant the restoration in addition to those specially named, of a very large number of landowners. But, as was soon apparent, the benefit which the Irish were to reap from the Act was dependent on how the Act was carried out, or rather on whether it was possible to carry it out at all. And it was soon apparent, as must have been known all along to Orrery and others, that it was quite impossible to carry it out if the adventurers and soldiers were to keep possession of what they had got. This
- ↑ The chief exception was Owen Roe O'Neill with his followers, who had violently opposed the peace. But before his death he had come to terms with Ormond in Oct. 1649.
