Page:Confiscation in Irish history.djvu/35

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THE TUDOR CONFISCATIONS
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and made their peace with the Crown, leaving Fitz Maurice to carry on an unequal struggle alone. The whole story is told vividly, though inaccurately, by Froude. The rebellion so far achieved its object that all plans for a confiscation and plantation were dropped; and so the subject need not detain us.

Sir Peter Carew died in 1575, and we hear no more of his claims in Cork and Kerry.[1] The lands which he had recovered in Idrone passed to his nephew, and then by purchase to the Bagenals, a family of English settlers. The head of this family was executed as an Irish Papist guilty of murder in 1641, by the Cromwellian government, after the submission of the Irish forces in Leinster, another curious instance of how the Protestant planter of one generation turns into the Irish Papist of the next.

At the Restoration it was held that he had been unjustly put to death and the lands were restored to his children.

The second confiscation on a large scale during the reign of Elizabeth followed on the suppression of the great Desmond rebellion in 1583.

The procedure adopted on this occasion is worthy of close attention, especially as it is misrepresented in most of our histories. We constantly read statements to the effect that the vast estates of the Earl of Desmond and his

  1. Sir Peter seems to have maintained his claims to the end; but he would appear to have been ready to be satisfied with a head rent from the Anglo-Norman lords and Irish chiefs who were in actual possession of the lands he claimed.
    In 1603 Thomas Wadding writes to Sir George Carew on Sir Peter's title in terms that suggest that he hoped Sir George would prosecute the claim. Car. Cal.