The plan upon which this new plantation was carried out was projected with the utmost care by the lawyers, the Irish Government, and the king himself.  The former plantations in Munster were an acknowledged failure, the reason assigned being the huge size of the grants made to the undertakers.  Many of these resided in England, and merely drew their rents, allowing Irish tenants to occupy the land.  This mistake was now to be avoided.  Only tracts that could be managed by a resident owner were to be granted, and from these the natives were to be entirely drawn.  “As well,” it was gravely stated, “for their greater security, as to preserve the purity of the English language.”

The better to ensure this important result marriages were strictly forbidden between the native Irish and the settlers, and in order to avoid that ever-formidable danger the former were ordered to remove themselves and their belongings bodily into certain reserved lands set apart for them.

The person who took the most prominent part in this undertaking was the well-known Sir John Davis, a distinguished lawyer and writer, who has himself left us a minute account of his own and his colleagues’ proceedings.  That those proceedings should have aroused some slight excitement and dismay amongst the dispossessed owners was not, perhaps, astonishing, even to those engaged in it.  In some instances, the proprietors even went the length of bringing lawyers from Dublin, to prove that their estates could not legally be forfeited through the attainder of the earls, and to plead, moreover, the king’s recent proclamation which undertook to secure to the inhabitants their possessions.  In reply to this, Sir John Davis and the other commissioners issued another proclamation.  “We published,” he says, “by proclamation in each county, what lands were to be granted to British undertakers, what to servitors, and what to natives, to the end that the natives should remove from the precincts allotted to the Britons, whereupon a clear plantation is to be made of English and Scottish without Irish.”  With regard to the rights of the king he is still more emphatic.  “Not only,” he says, “his Majesty may take this course lawfully, but he is bound in conscience to do so.”

These arguments, and probably still more the evident uselessness of any resistance, seem to have had their effect.  The discomfited owners submitted sullenly, and withdrew to the tracts allotted to them.  In Sir John Davis’ own neat and incisive words, “The natives seemed not unsatisfied in reason, though they remained in their passions discontented, being grieved to leave their possessions to strangers, which they had so long after their manner enjoyed.”

[Illustration:  DOORWAY OF ST. CAEMIN’S CHURCH, INISMAIN, ARAN ISLES.]

XXXII.

THE FIRST CONTESTED ELECTION.

In 1613, it was resolved by the Government to summon an Irish Parliament, for the purpose of giving legality to their recent proceedings in Ulster, and also to pass an Act of formal attainder upon the two exiled earls.