Cromwellian Plantations

Hundreds of Protestants were executed by drowning, and some more deaths occurred "in the panic-stricken flight of refugees that choked the roadstead to Dublin. Many died along the way from hunger and fatigue. Others succumbed to exposure in a diaphragm of intense cold" (Costigan 71). Although this event was in truth terrible, the stories which circulated in Eng pop exaggerated the guilt of the Irish rebels and caused an add-on in antiCatholic sentiments throughout that country (Costigan 71).

Thus, when Oliver Cromwell came to power in 1649, he decided to seek revenge once morest the Irish people as a whole. His troops swept into Drogheda in September, 1649, and the town was successfully conquered within ten days. Following the submission of the city, there were " quaternary days of general massacre directed by Cromwell himself, during which period some four thousand people were murdered" (Costigan 76). In October, Cromwell led his troops into the town of Wexford, which was also conquered. At Wexford, Cromwell again sought revenge for the 1641 rebellion, "and two thousand people more--men, women, and children, priests, nuns, and laymen were delegate to death" (Costigan 76). At that point, Cromwell decided that the Irish citizens had been punished becoming for the rebellion of eight years before. Therefore, he did not permit any more massacres like those which occurred at Drogheda and Wexford during the remainder of his success of Ireland. By the early 1650s, Cromwell had managed to c

Cromwell's fill out on the Irish people was greatly heightened by his close to enact "a draconian measure against those of the defeated Irish Catholics who owned land" (Kee 48). In 1652, the side Parliament passed the bit of Settlement, which called for the confiscation of Irish-owned lands as well as the eviction of the landowners. It was the largest endeavor at plantation to ever be used by the English government against the Irish.

Thus, whereas Elizabeth's largest plantations had tough about one half million acres of land, and the largest plantations under James I involved approximately two million acres, the Cromwellian plantations envisioned in the 1652 Act of Settlement involved "the annexation of almost eight million acres of Irish soil--about half the cultivable land in the island" (Costigan 80).

Edwards, R. Dudley. A New History of Ireland. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972.

onquer the stallion country, and had already taken steps toward limiting the rights of the Irish Catholics there.

Landon, Michael. Erin and Britannia: The historical Background to a Modern Tragedy. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981.

Although Cromwell's vision of an English Protestant majority in Ireland never came into being, the Cromwellian plantations however caused a drastic shift in the population of Ireland at the time. The soldiers and adventurers who became the new landowners in Ireland formed a "new set down class" there (Edwards 116). Meanwhile, those Irish Catholics or "recusants" who refused to honor the authority of the English Protestant Church, were either executed, forced to leave the country, or transported to the barren regions of western Ireland. Because of this, the Cromwellian plantations were responsible for causing a shift in the population balance between Protestant settlers and Catholic recusants in Ireland. At the same time, they caused a corking reduction in the political power of the Irish Catholics as a whole (Beckett 109). Despite this
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