Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/92

Charles II surrendered one-third of their estates to create a fund for reprisals; twenty persons, whose claims could scarcely be overlooked, were restored at once by special favour; but the Court of Claims was dissolved, and all petitioners who had not yet been heard—about 5,000 persons— were definitely and irrevocably excluded from the lands of their ancestors.

"The Acts of Settlement and Explanation," says a modern historian, "have been called the Great Charter of the Irish Protestants. They were the Domesday Book of their disinherited opponents." The extent of the confiscation has been very variously estimated; but, even if we accept the lowest estimate, it is probably without a parallel in the annals of the civilised world. Father Walsh, an Irish Franciscan, calculated that the landed property of the Catholics amounted, at the outbreak of the civil war, to nineteen-twentieths of the whole island. Colonel Lawrence, a Cromwellian soldier, reckoned it at ten-elevenths. It is probable that both these estimates were considerably in excess of the truth. Sir William Petty, who believed that in 1641 the Irish owned two-thirds of the good and all the unprofitable lands, perhaps erred on the other side. After the passing of the Act of Explanation they can scarcely have possessed more than one-fourth of the whole. 80