Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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peacetime administration, and they sat at Dalkeith from January to April

1652. Years of internal strife and occupation by an invading army had left

both central and local government in serious disarray, and the commissioners

did their honest best not merely to restore the status quo ante bellum but to

set up something of a new and better order. They could not ignore the fact

that large numbers of Scots had been at war with the English parliament on

and off for years, and that resistance was still smouldering, especially in the

Highlands. But since their main enemies, past and present, were among the

nobles and lairds, and since the Rump had decreed that no jurisdiction should

be exercised that did not draw its sanction from Westminster, they were able

to make a clean sweep of some oppressive feudal survivals. The old baron (or

barony) courts were abolished, to the considerable beneﬁt of small tenants.

Local justice now devolved upon the sheriff courts, and in each county the

high sheriff ’s authority was shared between two men, one Scottish and one

English. To head the judicial system at the national level, the parliamentary

commissioners appointed seven Commissioners for the Administration of

Justice, three Scottish and four English, and though the English judges were

granted some superior powers (and double the salary), Scotsmen dominated

the lower tiers of the judicial machine, which below the top level was left

largely intact. The English judges were far more sceptical than their predeces-

sors over accusations of witchcraft, and Scottish writers paid tribute to their

even-handed and enlightened justice. Suits were not allowed to drag on as

they had before, and smaller men pursued their rights at law against the rich

and great to an extent they had not previously dared.

Restoring municipal government and jurisdiction was another major task,

and the parliamentary commissioners linked it with a serious attempt to

obtain the towns’ acceptance of the forthcoming union. They organized the

election of representatives of the shires and burghs, eighty-nine constituencies

in all, to meet in Dalkeith during February 1652 in order to register their

assent to a ‘Tender of Incorporation’ which was there presented to them.

There was naturally considerable opposition to the union, and not just

because Scotsmen valued their independent nationhood and were reluctant to

renounce their king. The most hotly denounced of the English proposals was

the one concerning religious toleration, and the clergy, both Resolutioners

and Protesters, were vociferous in opposing the whole Tender on its account.

But while the kirkmen could enjoy the luxury of protest, most of the laity saw

sense in coming to terms, as a step towards ending the alien military presence,

recovering a degree of self-government, and making sure of their lands and

possessions. Seventy of the eighty-nine constituencies registered their assent

to the Tender promptly, and a minority did so with positive enthusiasm.

These were mainly in the west and south-west, where Cromwell and his army

had been widely regarded as a lesser evil than Charles II and the ‘malignants’.

568 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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Sixteen constituencies sent no delegates to Dalkeith, but in at least ﬁve it was

on account of their poverty, and they were excused. That left only three—

Glasgow, Morayshire, and Kirkcudbrightshire—which lodged positive dis-

sents from the Tender, in each case on religious grounds.

In March the delegates who had met at Dalkeith sent in return a Tender to

Parliament, which among other requests asked that fourteen representatives

of the shires and seven of the burghs should be allowed to come to London

and confer with the responsible members of the English parliament over the

detailed terms of the Bill of Union, which was already on the stocks; it had its

ﬁrst and second readings on 13 April 1652. Their request was granted; the bill

was put on one side until they got to London in October, after which they met

the committee entrusted with its preparation twenty-two times before the

expulsion of the Rump put an end to their consultations.

Long before this the eight parliamentary commissioners had returned from

Dalkeith to Westminster, but before doing so they took measure with regard

to two difﬁcult issues. One was the treatment of the chief nobles and lairds

who had been in arms against the parliament; their estates were naturally

liable to sequestration, but the appointment of three commissioners to super-

vise the process inevitably aroused great fear among Scottish landowners and

impelled many of them to join in Glencairn’s rising. The other problem centred

on the universities, and on the clergy generally. The latter’s opposition to the

union was so strident that their training-grounds, the universities, could not

safely be left in ultra-Presbyterian hands. The new principals whom the com-

missioners appointed were all distinguished men in their way, and they

covered a wide spectrum. Patrick Gillespie, their choice for Glasgow, was a

leader of the Protesters, and became in time a close friend of Owen, Lambert,

and Fleetwood. Robert Leighton, their nominee for Edinburgh, was by con-

trast a former Engager, and would eventually become Archbishop of

Glasgow. John Row, whom the commissioners installed at Aberdeen, had

already converted from Presbyterianism to Independency. They made no

change at St Andrews.

Before leaving Scotland they appointed nine men—the four English judges,

the three Sequestration Commissioners, the commander-in-chief (who was

still Richard Deane until December 1652), and the governer of Edinburgh

and Leith—as ‘commissioners for visiting and regulating universities and

other affairs relating to the ministry in Scotland’.

Their task of taming the

Kirk’s belligerence was made easier by the continued quarrelling between

Resolutioners and Protesters, and they went about it with commendable

tact. They allowed a General Assembly of the Kirk to meet in Edinburgh in

A New Order in Three Nations 569

Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, p. 58. This whole section is much indebted to Dr Dow’s ﬁne

work.

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July 1652, but it was a muted affair because the Protesters refused to

recognize it. The Protesters were very much a minority, however, and the

intransigence of such Presbyterian diehards was causing a small but signiﬁ-

cant stream of conversions to Independency, including some in high places. A

few leading ﬁgures would in time go all the way to Quakerism, such as

Alexander Jaffray, Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, and John Swinton,

one of the three Scottish Commissioners for Justice. Both were to sit for

Scotland in Barebone’s Parliament. Such conversions were due to conviction

and not to pressure from the Commissioners for the Universities and the

Ministry. The latter were hated by strict kirkmen like Robert Baillie for their

very existence, but they acted with moderation and impartiality. They

attempted no wholesale removal of ministers who prayed publicly for the

king, and in ﬁlling vacant beneﬁces they generally respected the wishes of

presbyteries and congregations.

The expulsion of the Rump naturally delayed the formal enactment of the

union, though Cromwell and the Council of Ofﬁcers assumed that it already

existed by summoning representatives of Scotland to Barebone’s Parliament.

Five members was a meagre allocation, however, especially since one of them,

Alexander Brodie of Brodie, a Lord of Session, decided after much heart-

searching not to attend. Nevertheless Barebone’s made good progress with a

bill of union, which was ready for its ﬁnal passage when worsening news form

Scotland caused it to be suspended. The English military commanders there

had somewhat overestimated the extent to which they had subjugated the

Highlands, and in the course of 1653 they were still interpreting as endemic

clan lawlessness what was becoming an organized royalist insurrection. As

early as June 1652 a number of chieftains and noblemen sent a collective mes-

sage to the king, signifying their willingness to rise for him, and he responded

with a circular letter addressed to the nobles and gentry of Scotland, thanking

them for their devotion and asking their fullest support for Lieutenant-

General John Middleton, whom he appointed commander-in-chief of all his

forces in the country. Middleton, once a zealous Covenanter but later an

Engager, had been wounded and captured at Worcester, where he com-

manded the king’s cavalry, but he had escaped from the Tower in his wife’s

clothes and joined his master in exile. In November 1652 Charles received

word that a group of associated chieftains and clans had pledged themselves

to raise some thousands of men for him, and were asking that Middleton

should join them shortly with supplies of arms and ammunition. But Middle-

ton did not judge the time ripe to take the ﬁeld in person, nor was he willing

that the Highland chiefs should choose an interim commander themselves, so

Charles commissioned the Earl of Glencairn to command his Scottish sup-

porters until Middleton himself took over. Glencairn, being a Lowlander and

a former Engager, found his authority challenged by more than one of the

570 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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most heavily involved Highland chiefs, whose enterprise was in the spirit of

Montrose rather than of Hamilton. But his appointment was designed to

appeal to the potential support of the many Lowland nobles and gentry who

wanted to rid their country of the English invaders. There was never a chance

that the Highlanders could do the king’s business by themselves, and always

a doubt that they could be brought to agree together wholeheartedly.

They never did, and Argyll, the greatest magnate and clansman in the coun-

try, chose to stick with the English. He had a low opinion of Charles II, and

no illusions about his intentions towards Scotland. He made an equally

shrewd appraisal of the Highlanders’ chances of success, and reasonably con-

cluded that a restoration of the monarchy by royalist arms was not only

unlikely but would, if achieved, be against the interests of his clan, himself,

and his country. He drove a hard bargain with Deane, securing ﬁnancial

advantages for his territory and himself, and then signed a full agreement in

August 1652, promising to live at peace with the English government. Deane

left Scotland in December to become a General at Sea, and Colonel Robert

Lilburne, who took over the command of the English forces, was never quite

sure of Argyll’s loyalty. But Argyll gave tangible assistance to Lilburne’s

forces in the summer and early autumn of 1653, especially in their campaign

to secure the islands of Lewis and Mull.

The royalists did indeed recruit signiﬁcant numbers of Lowlanders, and

from September 1653 onward they were raiding far into south-west Scotland.

Lilburne, who at ﬁrst lacked the political ﬂair of Deane before him and Monck

after, increased support for the insurgents’ cause by overreacting somewhat;

he dissolved a General Assembly of the Kirk in July 1653, and in the same

month his troops broke up a convention of royal burghs at Cupar, though he

did allow another one to meet in October. By January 1654 a royalist report

claimed 9,000 or 10,000 men under arms for the king, but a contemporary

English estimate put them at half that number. At any rate they were never a

match for Lilburne, who disposed of 12,500 infantry and ﬁve regiments of

horse. There were several reasons why they never realized their full potential.

Too many Highland chiefs proved reluctant to honour their pledges when the

call came to bring their clansmen to a rendezvous. The Lowland gentry, how-

ever much they wanted to see the English occupiers driven out, hesitated

when it came to welcoming armed Highlanders into their territory, for the

damage that they did to property was notorious. Smaller Lowland land-

holders felt the same way, but more strongly: they would much rather have

disciplined English troops who paid their way in their midst than Highland

raiders. Even in the Highlands, many clansmen preferred to pay their cess to

the English rather than to their chiefs, because the reprisals they suffered for

refusing it were so unpleasant. Furthermore, the royalist commanders and

clan chiefs weakened their cause by constantly clashing among themselves.

A New Order in Three Nations 571

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To take just one example, Argyll’s son and heir Lord Lorne deﬁed his father

and took the king’s side, but did it more harm than good through his incorri-

gible quarrelsomeness towards his fellow-royalists. Finally, Lilburne deserves

all credit for constantly striving to ensure that his troops did not oppress the

common people or resort to free quarter, and to see that the assessment was

levied equitably, which he did in full consultation with the gentry of each

county. He also pressed continually for an Act of Oblivion which would iden-

tify the landowners who were liable to ﬁnes and forfeitures and leave the

rest in untroubled enjoyment of their property. This was a measure that

Barebone’s took over from the Rump, but never got as far as enacting.

Middleton belatedly landed in Scotland in February 1654, bringing a

modest supply of arms and powder. He was shocked by the state in which he

found the king’s supporters, for Glencairn’s rising was already past its peak

before it ever risked a battle. The Protectoral government took the situation

in Scotland swiftly in hand, designating Monck as commander-in-chief. He

took over from Lilburne, who was longing to be relieved, in April, and in the

same month Cromwell approved an Ordinance of Union , based on the bill so

nearly passed by Barebone’s Parliament, which his council had been working

on since January. Cromwell was taking advantage of the temporary power to

legislate which the Instrument of Government gave to him and the council,

pending the meeting of his ﬁrst parliament. The ordinance formally abolished

the royal ofﬁce and the separate parliament of Scotland, and conﬁrmed the

country’s representation in the parliament at Westminster. It promised free

trade and proportionate rates of taxation between Scotland and England. It

decreed that vassalage and feudal incidents were henceforth abolished, and

that apart from the dues paid on death called heriots, tenants were to owe

their landlords no other service than their rents. The private jurisdiction of

the magnates was transferred to courts baron, which differed fundamentally

from the old barony courts in being public tribunals, modelled on the English

manorial courts. A separate ordinance deﬁned their powers and prescribed

their frequency, but it was Monck’s aim to establish a system of justices of the

peace in Scotland, and this (as will be seen) was to be put in hand when the

country had been fully paciﬁed and the transformation of its civil government

completed. A third ordinance, promulgated on the same 12 April as the other

two, was styled an ‘Act of Pardon and Grace’, and implemented the amnesty

which the Rump and Barebone’s Parliament had intended. It excepted twenty-

four landowners whose estates were to be totally conﬁscated and seventy-

three who were to suffer ﬁnes. It also excluded all who were actively engaged

in the current rising, but Monck issued a proclamation on 4 May, promising

pardon to all who submitted, except the ninety-seven named in the ordinance.

He lost no time in confronting Middleton and his dwindling forces. He

marched into the Highlands in June, and in collaboration with Colonel

572 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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Thomas Morgan waged a vigorous campaign which broke the back of royal-

ist resistance before the end of December. The decisive engagement was

fought on 19/20 July at Dalnaspidal at the northern tip of Loch Garry, where

Monck drove Middleton’s men into the arms of Morgan’s cavalry, who put

them to utter rout. After that he pursued the royalist remnants relentlessly.

Some of their leaders surrendered to him during August, and he granted them

remarkably generous terms. By the late autumn Middleton commanded a

mere 300 men, mostly infantry, and he was ﬁnding it impossible to recruit

more. Those chiefs who were still loyal to him and the king were ﬁnding their

clansmen refusing to ﬁght. The winter of 1654/5 was an exceptionally harsh

one in the Highlands, and Monck secured a fresh wave of surrenders from

January onward. This was partly because chiefs and lairds had come to see

the king’s cause as hopeless, and partly because the terms that Monck was

granting now allowed their men to keep their arms. Thereby he not only

salved their pride, but recognized that in the endemically feuding Highlands

the clans needed to defend themselves against each other. It was his realistic

policy, once they submitted, to let them share in the enforcement of law and

order within their own territory.

Early in 1655 Middleton was driven to take refuge in the isle of Skye, and

in April he rejoined the king in exile. There was a brief stirring of activity

while the English royalists attempted a rising during March, but by May

Glencairn’s rising was at an end. All its remaining leaders had surrendered, or

were negotiating articles of surrender. Monck, who had no desire to place any

more restraints on the ordinary people of Scotland than security demanded,

felt able to relax the ban on the meetings of presbyteries and synods that

Lilburne had imposed. The legislative foundations of the Cromwellian union

had already been laid, and the way was now clear for placing the government

of Scotland on a positive footing.

In the year or so following the expulsion of the Rump, Cromwell and his

councillors were as keen to grasp the nettle of Ireland’s future as they were to

establish a new order in Scotland; but the problems posed by the two coun-

tries were utterly different, and so were the attitudes and assumptions with

which the English government approached them. The Scots were overwhelm-

ingly a protestant nation, the Irish a catholic one. Most of the Scots had been

the Long Parliament’s allies in the ﬁrst Civil War, most of the Irish its bitter

enemies. Gross exaggerations of the scale on which protestant settlers in

Ireland had been massacred in 1641 were still being kept alive in 1653–4.

Whereas the early Protectorate identiﬁed less than a hundred Scottish

landowners as deserving ﬁnes or conﬁscation, it inherited assumptions about

the collective guilt of the Irish that bound its hands. The so-called

Cromwellian settlement of Ireland was to a large extent governed by decisions

A New Order in Three Nations 573

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taken and measures passed by the Long Parliament over more than a decade

before Cromwell became head of state, and a brief retrospect is necessary to

show the position from which he started.

From a very early stage in the Irish rebellion the Long Parliament took the

view that the cost of suppressing it should be met from the large quantities of

land that it expected to conﬁscate from the rebels. Prompted by the need to

secure a loan of £100,000 from the City of London, it passed an act in Febru-

ary 1642 for the conﬁscation of 2,500,000 acres, which was roughly

18 per cent of all the proﬁtable land in Ireland, for the satisfaction of such

‘adventurers’ as would advance money for the war against the rebels. At this

stage it was intended that the lands to be forfeited would be equally divided

between Ulster, Munster, Leinster, and Connaught, and the adventurers were

expected to settle in them personally. Parliament had as yet little knowledge

of which provinces were most deeply engaged in rebellion and its attendant

atrocities, and even less of the total acreage of Ireland. But the act assumed the

almost universal guilt of Irish catholics, and by committing England to sup-

pressing the rebels by force it killed any lingering possibility of negotiating

with them. Charles I gave it the royal assent, partly because he dared not

appear to condone the rebellion and partly because he was mortiﬁed by Phe-

lim O’Neil’s false claim to be acting under a royal commission.

Subscriptions were disappointingly slow in coming in, and one aim of the

propaganda that so infamously exaggerated the horrors of the ‘massacre’ was

to persuade more adventurers to put up their money. Two explanatory acts

and an ordinance extended the scope and improved the terms of the original

offer, and the response rose, though not as much as was hoped. Even a

‘doubling ordinance’ in 1643, which offered twice as much land to any

investor who added only a quarter to his original subscription, found only

171 takers and brought in less than £12,000. Long before parliament could

actually carry out the reconquest of Ireland, it was committed to a conﬁsca-

tion measured not by the rebels’ supposed guilt but by its obligations to its

own creditors. When it later decided to pay the arrears of its army in Ireland

out of Irish land, the disproportion between ‘crime’ and punishment became

even more blatant.

At the ﬁrst launching of the adventure, it had been expected that the great

majority of participators would be wealthy Londoners. But from an early

stage it attracted people from all walks of life from yeomen upward, and dur-

ing the unexpectedly long period between the launch and the ﬁnal reposses-

sion of Ireland the investment changed in character. Irish land was seriously

undervalued at the rates ﬁrst offered, and many speculators bought and sold

shares in it who had no intention of settling on it. By 1652, when the recon-

quest was complete, there were slightly over 1,500 adventurers to be satisﬁed,

and they had raised a little over £300,000. Just over half were Londoners, and

574 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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they contributed more than half the total. In parliament itself 119 MPs had

put up nearly £70,000 between them. One disappointment, however, was the

scheme’s failure to attract many really large investors, for only ﬁfty are

known to have risked £1,000 or more, and only two more than £2,500. And

though £300,000 was quite an impressive sum for the time, the total cost of

suppressing the Irish rebellion came to almost ten times that ﬁgure.

There was a hope towards the end of the ﬁrst Civil War that it might be

suppressed very soon, but political conﬂict within the parliament killed it. Sir

Hardress Waller, who had commanded the parliamentary forces in Munster

during 1644, launched a proposal in December 1645 that Cromwell should

be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, as a prelude to his undertaking the

reconquest at an early date. Cromwell’s political enemies responded, how-

ever, by putting forward Viscount Lisle, son of the Earl of Leicester, the last

pre-war holder of the ofﬁce. After hot debates Lisle was made Lord Lieutenant,

though for one year only from 9 April 1646. This was a rebuff not only to

Cromwell but to the New Model Army, the adventurers and the protestant

interest in Ireland, for Lisle was justly seen as ‘the do-nothing ﬁgurehead of a

do-nothing Irish policy’.

He did not even go to Ireland until his commission

was within six weeks of expiring, and once there he did the parliamentary

cause positive harm by his bad relations with the Earl of Inchiquin. His pres-

ence was instrumental in impelling Inchiquin to make his peace with Ormond

in 1648 and return to the king’s service. The lack of clear purpose in English

policy towards Ireland was largely due to the quarrels at Westminster

between presbyterians and independents, and after the army had been

goaded into revolt it was plain that the reconquest would not go ahead until

the leading presbyterians had been driven from the political stage.

By the time the Irish campaigns had been fought and won, it had come to

be assumed that the 35,000 ofﬁcers and men engaged in them would be paid

off with Irish land. There had been no ﬁrm parliamentary pronouncement,

but the assumption took root because no one could think how else the huge

cost of the operation could be met. It was going to call for far more land than

would be needed to satisfy the adventurers, and was to alter the whole future

pattern of English settlement in Ireland. But the adventurers were opening

their mouths much wider by 1652, and one can partly understand why. They

had been without the use of their money for far longer than they had antici-

pated. Ireland had become a war-torn, widely desolated country, and land

values in it had severely declined. Much of it was unsafe, too, with bands of

Irish ‘tories’ preying upon English invaders where they could, for reasons of

survival as well as patriotism. The adventurers were no longer content to take

A New Order in Three Nations 575

Karl S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land (Oxford, 1971), p. 97. The treatment

of Ireland in this chapter is deeply indebted to Bottigheimer’s meticulous study.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 575

land scattered among the four provinces; they wanted their settlement to be

wholly within one undivided area, in Munster and adjacent parts of Leinster.

They claimed not only over a million acres which they reckoned as their due

under the original acts, but an extra half million to compensate for having

had their capital tied up so long. They did not propose to settle any of their

land until the ﬁghting in Ireland had completely ceased.

They were opposed, however, from Dublin, by the four parliamentary

commissioners who had constituted a provisional government since October

1650. The commissioners wanted the adventurers to begin planting immedi-

ately, on the terms originally agreed, in four ‘allotments’ spaced over sixteen

counties. They favoured a total clearance of the native Irish from these settle-

ment areas, but this did not appeal to the adventurers, who seem to have

reckoned on exploiting cheap Irish labour. To provide ammunition for their

case they turned to Henry Jones, who combined the ofﬁces of protestant

Bishop of Clogher, Vice-Chancellor of Dublin University and Scoutmaster-

General. He had been employed from early in 1642 in collecting reports of the

atrocities attributed to the rebels; now he produced an enlarged and even

more inﬂammatory compendium of them. It was read in the Rump on

19 May 1652, and published as An Abstract of some cruel Massacres of the

Protestants and English in Ireland. It has been well compared to the Protocols

of the Elders of Zion,

because its purpose had little to do with historical truth

and everything with supplying justiﬁcation for a wholesale conﬁscation and

clearance. It had a pernicious inﬂuence on the Act for the Settling of Ireland

passed in August 1652, for hitherto the Rump had been much divided as to

how severely or leniently to treat the Irish people, and Jones’s Abstract tilted

the balance towards harshness.

The act did not tackle the really difﬁcult problems of how much land

should be conﬁscated and where, or how it should be distributed between the

adventurers and the army in Ireland, but it did decree how the Irish people

were to be dealt with. It granted pardon to all ‘the inferior sort’ who submit-

ted, but with regard to men of substance it deﬁned ﬁve categories who were

to be excluded from pardon as to life or estate or both, according to their

‘respective demerits’. A list of 105, headed by Ormond, were totally excepted

by name; the other four excluded groups were all abettors of the rebellion in

its early stages, all priests and Jesuits in any way involved in it, all who had

murdered civilians, and all who failed to lay down their arms within twenty-

eight days. Ofﬁcers who had fought against the parliament were to be ban-

ished and their estates forfeited, though their wives and children were to be

given land worth a third of what they had lost in a location to be decided

by parliament. Non-belligerent catholics also faced forfeiture unless they

576 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, pp. 127–8.

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had shown ‘constant good affection’ to the parliament, though they were

to be compensated elsewhere with land valued at two-thirds of what they

surrendered.

If the act had been rigorously implemented it might have initiated a huge

bloodbath, for it has been reckoned that the one clause excluding abettors of

the rebellion rendered up to 80,000 people liable to the death penalty. Fortu-

nately the execution of the act was much less draconian than its letter. Its

object, at least in the eyes of those who carried it out, was not to deal out

wholesale retribution but to clear the way for conﬁscation on a scale not yet

known (because the total quantity of disposable land and size of the army’s

claim on it had yet to be ascertained) by making nearly all land held by

catholics subject to forfeiture. To try all those whom it rendered subject to the

death penalty, the Rump set up a high court of justice in October 1652, and

it sat in several provincial centres as well as in Dublin. Its records are very

incomplete, but those who were executed under its sentence were to be

counted in hundreds at most rather than in thousands. Sir Phelim O’Neill,

who was captured in February 1653, was its only really prominent victim, and

by the time Cromwell became Protector the court seems to have ceased to sit.

Nearly all the Irish ofﬁcers and soldiers who voluntarily surrendered in the

course of the ﬁghting and after its end were allowed to leave the country and

take service in foreign armies, like so many Irishmen before them, and the

great majority did so. Sir William Petty, the great political economist who was

soon to know the country better than anyone, estimated that 34,000 left it to

enlist abroad. A much smaller but still substantial number of prisoners of war

were sent as indentured labourers to the West Indies and other plantations.

Transportation had already been used to get rid of paupers and vagabonds

and people who aided the tories, but what had been quite a stream thinned to

a trickle from 1655 onward. Merchants came to ﬁght shy of Irish bondsmen,

for the planters regarded them as trouble-makers and found they got much

more work out of African slaves. Figures are scarce, but by the late 1660s

there were about 12,000 Irish in all the West Indies, compared with 50,000

black slaves.

During June and July 1653, busy as they were with other matters,

Cromwell and his interim Council of State took in hand the questions from

which the Rump had shied away: which areas of Ireland were to be cleared for

plantation and where the uprooted Irish should be settled. It was urgent to

provide for the English forces in Ireland that were now in process of disband-

ment. The ﬁrst need was for a national survey, since no one knew how much

land there was in Ireland to dispose of. Three distinct surveys were instituted

A New Order in Three Nations 577

A New History of Ireland, III, 359–60. The excellent chapter on ‘The Cromwellian regime,

1650–60’ is by Patrick J. Corish.

Ibid., p. 364.

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