It was pretended that the course most favourable to the Irish was to name in the Bill those persons who were to be restored. The foolish optimism of the Irish had, at the beginning, led them to ask for quite impossible conditions[1]; now their agents, while abandoning the mass of their countrymen, hoped for the individual restoration of themselves and of their friends. The Calendars of State Papers are full of petitions setting forth the causes of various individuals who hoped for inclusion in the favoured few.[2]
The Viscount Magennis of Iveagh, one of the ensignmen, had lost 45,000 acres.
Captain Daniel O'Sullivan Bere, lord of Bere and Bantry, prayed for restoration to the vast estates confirmed by Elizabeth and James to his grandfather and father for their services against the famous Donnell O'Sullivan of Dunboy. His property had not been set out to an adventurer or soldier, and he had obtained letters ordering his restoration. He had been given possession. But in spite of this Sir W. Petty and others deriving title from one Walters, "who is no adventurer or soldier, but got a great part of petitioner's estate from Cromwell as a gratuity for transporting and selling your Majesty's subjects beyond seas," had possessed themselves of his estate. He prays a clause restoring him.[3]
- ↑ Carte gives two reasonable schemes, one by Eustace, the other by Lord Montgomery, but says he cannot find that the Irish agents ever favoured them.
- ↑ See, for example, Cal. St. Paps., 1669—70, p. 49i (addenda) for such petitions. Among the petitioners we find descendants of Elizabethan and Jacobean planters such as Dudley Colclough and Sir Thos. Esmond of Wexford.
- ↑ Cal. St. Paps., 1669—70: addenda, p. 456.
