Cromwellian Plantations in 1650s Ireland
This is an excerpt from the paper...
This paper will discuss the Cromwellian plantations in Ireland during the 1650s. The Cromwellian plantations, in which thousands of Irish were evicted from their land, was just one chapter in the long struggle of the Irish against English domination. The English had first begun the domination of Ireland during the 1100s, with the reign of Henry II. Prejudice against Irish Catholics increased in the 1500s, when Henry VIII established the Protestant Church of England as the official church of the state. Also in the 1500s, during the reign of Elizabeth I, the first plantations were imposed upon Irish landowners. These plantations caused the Irish to lose their lands, which were in turn sold or leased to English colonists and speculators. Such plantations continued during the early 1600s with the Stuart dynasty and the reign of James I and Charles I. However, they reached new heights in the years following 1649, when the Commonwealth leader Oliver Cromwell took control of both England and Ireland. In October, 1641, the tension between Irish Catholics and English Protestants accelerated when a rebellion broke out in Dublin, Ulster and other locations across Ireland. In Dublin, the Irish rebels failed in their attempt to overthrow the seat of English government located there. However, in Ulster, Irish rebels took complete control of the city and forcibly drove out the English Protestant population. In so doing, however, the rebels turned the event into a horrible massacre
. . .
s had involved 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).
The Act of Settlement decreed that all of the lands east of the Shannon River were to be taken over by English landowners. The less fertile land of Connacht, to the west of the Shannon, was set aside for certain Irish landowners, provided they qualified by English law. As such, "all Catholics were to lose their lands, but those who could prove constant good affection to the parliament of England would be permitted to enjoy lands in Connacht valued at two-thirds of what they previously held" (Edwards 116). Those who resisted transportation to Connacht were sentenced to death. In this regard, the Irish Catholic landowners were given a choice between death and Connacht, or as the popular saying of the day went, between "Hell and Connacht." Following the establishment of the Act of Settlement in 1652, the Irish landowners "were told that they must be gone from their ancestral homes by March 1655, t
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Act Settlement, Irish Catholic, Hundreds Protestants, River English, Drogheda Wexford, Ireland Cromwellian, Jamaica Costigan, Wexford Cromwell, Church England, Irish Catholics, cromwellian plantations, irish catholics, act settlement, irish people, english protestant, edwards 116, irish rebels, irish landowners, plantations caused irish, caused irish, drogheda wexford, ireland cromwellian plantations, english protestant population,
Approximate Word count = 1441
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
