Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/28

Cromwell in Ireland Speaker is then asked "to have these indictments submitted to such members of the House as are learned in the law, for legal correction and amendment." The documents are then to be returned to Lord Cork, so that the persons named may be proceeded against as outlaws, and possession taken of their estates, which "I dare boldly affirm," he writes, "are of the yearly value of more than 200,000 pounds." In these interesting documents we have at once a foreclosure of about another two million acres.

There happens to be another letter of this Boyle's extant which throws a yet more lurid light upon the conspiracy of plunder then concocted. It is written to the Earl of Warwick in 1641, and in it he says that the ambition of his life has been "to roote out the Popish partie of the natives of the Kingdome, and to plant it with English Protestants, to prevent these Irish Papists from having any land here, and not to suffer them to live therein; to attainte them all of high treason, and to encourage the English to serve courageously against them, in hope to be settled in the lands of them they shall kill or otherwise destroy." Writing to the Lords Justices in Dublin he urges the same policy, and one of them—the notorious Parsons—replies, "I am of your mind that a thorow destruction must 16