The Government, as it has been already remarked, reserved the best part of the land for themselves.  They secured the towns, church-lands, and tithes, and abolished the Protestant Church, with all its officers, which had been so recently declared the religion of the country.  A “Church of Christ” was now the established religion, and a Mr. Thomas Hicks was approved by the “Church of Christ” meeting at Chichester House, as one fully qualified to preach and dispense the Gospel as often as the Lord should enable him, and in such places as the Lord should make his ministry most effectual.  The Parliament also reserved for themselves the counties of Dublin, Kildare, Carlow, and Cork; and from these lands and the church property they were to enrich themselves, and, with what they could spare, to reward the leading regicides and rebels.  The adventurers were next provided for.  They claimed L960,000.  This was divided into three lots, to be paid in lands in Munster, Leinster, and Ulster.  All these were to be drawn by lot; and a lottery was held at Grocers’ Hall, London, which commenced at eight o’clock in the morning, on the 20th of July, 1653, at which time and place men who professed the advancement of the Christian religion to be the business of their lives, openly and flagrantly violated the most solemn and explicit commands of that very belief which they declared themselves so zealous in upholding.  The soldiers and officers were to obtain whatever was left after the adventurers had been satisfied.

A book was written by a Franciscan father, called Threnodia Hiberno-Catholica, sive Planctus Universalis totius Cleri et Populi Regni Hiberniae,[495] in which the writer states he had heard a great Protestant statesman give three reasons why this transplantation was confined to the gentry, and why the poor, who had not been either transported or hanged, were allowed to remain:  (1) because the English wanted them to till the ground; (2) they hoped they would become Protestants when deprived of their priests; (3) because the settlers required servants, or else they should have worked for themselves.

But the fatal day at length arrived, and those who had dared to linger, or to hope that so cruel a sentence would not be finally executed, were at once undeceived.  The commissioners had been in trouble all the winter:  the people who were to be driven out of their farms refused to sow for those who were to succeed them; and the very plotters of the iniquity began to tremble for the consequences which might accrue to themselves.  They fasted, they prayed, and they wrote pages of their peculiar cant, which would be ludicrous were it not profane.  They talked loudly of their unworthiness for so great a service, but expressed no contrition for wholesale robbery.  Meanwhile, however, despite cant, fasts, and fears, the work went on.  The heads of each family were required to proceed to Loughrea before the 31st of January, 1654, to receive such