Page:Confiscation in Irish history.djvu/23

 with the O'Conors of Offaly—negotiations which unluckily were never brought to completion—the intention was to provide for all claimants to land under Irish custom.

We clearly see, both from the Composition of Connaught in 1585, and from the Books of Survey and Distribution, that the effect of Henry's grants to O'Brien of Thomond and Mac William Burke of Clanricard, was to give them a title good in English law to the lordship of their countries, with the various rights and profits attaching to it, and to the landlordship of the actual castles and demesne lands set apart by the clan for the defence of the territory and the support of the chief. There was of course some injustice here, for of these castles and lands the chief was only a trustee, so that at his death they went or should go to his successor by tanistry: whereas by the new arrangement they were to go on his death to his heir according to English law. But this was an injustice more theoretical than real, and can only have affected the immediate kinsmen of the chief.

The confiscation of the possessions of the House of Kildare and its adherents, and that operated by the Statute of Absentees are the only instances from the reign of Henry VIII. But no "plantation" or introduction of any new strain into the population followed on them, and the effect if not the intention of the latter seems to have been to improve the position of the native Irish occupants of the lands claimed by the forfeiting absentees.

But Henry's grants contained in them the germ