Page:Confiscation in Irish history.djvu/60

Undertakers' lands, provided that they were given leases for life, or for twenty-one years, and that provision was made to force such Irish tenants to abandon the mode of life and the religion of their forefathers.

And so we find to-day the curious result that the two counties of Ulster in which the Teutonic and Protestant element definitely predominates over the Irish and Catholic are Down and Antrim, areas in which, up to the time of Cromwell, there was scarcely any confiscation, and no attempt at colonisation on the part of the government.^[1]

The old Irish element persisted in the six plantation counties, intermingled with but distinct from the colonists. Religious distinctions kept the three races Irish, Scots, English apart.

1. Here the colonisation from Great Britain was the result of private enterprize. Belfast and a certain area round it was treated as forfeited or as ancient property of the Crown and granted to Chichester. Kilultagh was granted to Sir James Hamilton and ultimately to Sir Fulke Conway. But the remainder of the two counties, except abbey lands, was either regranted to the former chiefs, or was held by settlers of old English descent who were not disturbed, or was granted to the head of the MacDonnells, a Catholic Scottish clan who for two centuries past had been establishing themselves on the coast. Iveagh was divided up among some forty-four of the chief clansmen.
   More than one of the great Irish grantees soon parted with their lands to Britons. Particularly noteworthy is the case of Sir Con O'Neill of Upper Clandeboy, who by means set out at length in the Montgomery and Hamilton Manuscripts, was induced to make over two-thirds of his immense estates to two hungry Scotsmen, Sir Hugh Montgomery and Sir James Hamilton. The new landowners brought over large numbers of their countrymen. The country round Belfast had been nearly depopulated by the merciless warfare waged by Chichester, who as he himself tells us, slew all without any distinction of sex or rank whom he met with during his forays between 1600 and 1603 (see Cal. St. Paps., 1599—1603, p. 356). The new settlers soon acquired lands under the remaining Irish owners. Of 13,092 men whom the British in Ulster could put into the field in 1633, 5,663 were in Down and Antrim. (Bonn, quoting from Gilbert, Vol. I., p. 278).