island. I have given, elsewhere, reasons for believing that this estimate is greatly in excess of the truth: it is possible that instead of a third, they held a seventh or even only an eighth.[1] Whatever they actually held at Charles's death, it is certain that by the confiscation that followed on the downfall of James the Catholics lost about a million and a half English acres of "profitable" land. The Cromwellian and the Williamite confiscations, like those of Elizabeth, had fallen on Irish and Anglo-Irish alike. Among the victims too were to be found many whose ancestors had first settled as colonists of forfeited lands under Mary, or Elizabeth, or even James. A common misfortune had welded all these into one race.
When the Court of Claims set up under the Resumption Act had done its work it is doubtful whether as much as one-twentieth of the soil of Ireland remained in the hands of Catholics. If we add to this the area held by those great lords of the old race who had embraced Protestantism we shall get the whole amount held in 1703 by the descendants of those who a century and a half before had held the whole island. The remainder had been confiscated, some of it twice over.
The object of the penal laws of the eighteenth century was to secure that the area still owned by Catholics should never be increased, and should be as far as possible diminished. These laws succeeded but too well in their object. At the end of the seventeenth century while, chiefly by the opera-
- ↑ Bonn accepts Petty's figures, and holds that under William the third was reduced to a sixth. (Bonn, Vol. II., p. 158). Both these figures seem to me to be much too high.
