whom grants of all the clan lands had been made seem to have followed the same course. There is no reason to suppose that O'Neill or O'Donnell would have been less grasping than Cameron of Lochiel, or the Mac Donalds of the Isles, or the Campbells of Argyll.
Yet, laying aside speculation as to what might have been, it is worth while to reflect on some of the consequences which flowed from the confiscation of Ulster. There was the misery of the expelled Irish, breeding a rancour made all the more bitter by the feeling that the King's word had been broken, and that the promises made in his name by his representatives had been ignored. From this bitterness came the rising of 1641 which in its turn brought with it more injustice giving rise to a train of evils the consequences of which have not yet worked themselves out.
And greatest sufferers by the results of the Plantation were the descendants of the King who was responsible for the scheme. When we read how the Duchess of Buckingham found O'Cahane's wife old and in rags crouching amid ruins over a scanty fire, there may rise before us at the same time the picture of James' daughter the "Winter Queen," a fugitive and a widow, begging her bread from half the courts of Europe, and of his daughter-in-law—daughter of France, widowed Queen of England—lying in her room in Paris unable to leave her bed, because she had neither clothes to wear nor fire at which to warm herself.
Their miseries, however, are only incidents in a great family tragedy, and in that tragedy a large if not a deciding part is played by Ulster.
