Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/82

Charles II social evils of Ireland" and that settlement the restored monarch made haste in its most essential features to confirm.

In order justly to appreciate the merits of this transaction we must be careful to bear in mind the previous relations between Charles Stuart and his Irish subjects. The proprietors whom Cromwell had so recently despoiled consisted of two classes,—of men who had taken arms in the winter of 1641 against the government of Charles the First, and of men whose only crime had been the loyalty with which they had maintained the cause of that unfortunate prince. The latter, at least, could scarcely be regarded as very criminal by Charles and his advisers: and it might plausibly be urged that the former, even had no express stipulation existed in their favour, had more than redeemed, by their resistance to the usurping Government, the crime or the error into which they had been driven. But this was not all. By a treaty concluded only a few days before his death, Charles the First had granted a full pardon to all his Irish subjects, and this treaty his successor "had by his letters approved and given repeated promises of confirming it."

It was natural, therefore, that the dispossessed proprietors, who had suffered so cruelly during the preceding decade, should have expected that 70