of granting the “graces” and the atrocious duplicity and incomparable “meanness” of the King is placed eternally on record, in his own letter to his favourite, in which he thanks him “for keeping off the envy [odium] of a necessary negative from me, of those unreasonable graces that people expected from me."[471] Wentworth describes himself how two judges and Sir John Radcliffe assisted him in the plan, and how a positive refusal was made to recommend the passing of the “graces” into law at the next session.

“Charles’ faith” might now safely rank with Grey’s; and the poor impoverished Irishman, who would willingly have given his last penny, as well as the last drop of his blood, to save his faith, was again cruelly betrayed where he most certainly might have expected that he could have confided and trusted.  One of the “graces” was to make sixty years of undisputed possession of property a bar to the claims of the crown; and certainly if there ever a country where such a demand was necessary and reasonable, it was surely Ireland.  There had been so many plantations, it was hard for anything to grow; and so many settlements, it was hard for anything to be settled.  Each new monarch, since the first invasion of the country by Henry II., had his favourites to provide for and his friends to oblige.  The island across the sea was considered “no man’s land,” as the original inhabitants were never taken into account, and were simply ignored, unless, indeed, when they made their presence very evident by open resistance to this wholesale robbery.  It was no wonder, then, that this “grace” should be specially solicited.  It was one in which the last English settler in Ulster had quite as great an interest as the oldest Celt in Connemara.  The Burkes and the Geraldines had suffered almost as much from the rapacity of their own countrymen as the natives, on whom their ancestors had inflicted such cruel wrongs.  No man’s property was safe in Ireland, for the tenure was depending on the royal will; and the caprices of the Tudors were supplemented by the necessities of the Stuarts.

But the “grace” was refused, although, probably, there was many a recent colonist who would have willingly given one-half of his plantation to have secured the other to his descendants.  The reason of the refusal was soon apparent.  As soon as Parliament was dissolved, a Commission of “Defective Titles” was issued for Connaught.  Ulster had been settled, Leinster had been settled, Munster had been settled; there remained only Connaught, hitherto so inaccessible, now, with advancing knowledge of the art of war, and new means of carrying out that art, doomed to the scourge of desolation.