It is hard to imagine the scale of the destruction of those years but it has been estimated that the population of Ireland after the Cromwellian settlement was approximately one million.  Since the start of the 1640s over half a million people had been killed.  For any society to lose more than one third of its population through religious and political violence is a trauma that is not easily overcome.

In the light of all of this, the events at the end of the century surrounding William of Orange and James II were almost inevitable.  The Cromwellian victory saw further plantation in Ireland with the native Irish being banished to the poorer land in the West under threat of death: “To hell or Connaught”.

While the expected wide scale plantation did not meet with enthusiasm among potential planters in England and Scotland the resentment caused by further dispossession among the Irish intensified.  Following the restoration of the monarchy there was an opportunity for a return of some lands to their previous owners but by 1665 Catholics owned some twenty percent of the land whereas in 1641 they still had possession of sixty percent.  Further migration of Scottish settlers into Ulster boosted the Presbyterian population there, a fact that was reflected in the extension of the Scottish principle of an annual payment from the crown to Presbyterian ministers becoming accepted in Ulster.

When James II, a Catholic, came to the throne he allowed Catholics to achieve high office within Ireland.  This fuelled all the old suspicions and antagonisms: the wounds of the 1640s were reopened.  The overall conflict between James and Parliament which led to the invitation to William of Orange to become co-monarch with his wife Mary was much more complicated than it appeared to be from an Irish perspective.  For example, the Pope wished for a Williamite victory, while William’s triumph led not to domination by a Protestant king but rather, in England, enabled progress towards Parliamentary democracy.  Within Ireland, however, it was largely seen as a Protestant victory over Irish Catholics.  When the war effectively ended with large numbers of Irish soldiers leaving Ireland to join the armies of various European states including France, Spain and Austria, Irish Catholics were in possession of no more than fifteen percent of the land.  This created further alienation between the Irish and the planters and between the Irish and the English administration.  This mutual alienation was to get much worse before any signs of improvement appeared.

THE ASCENDENCY

The end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries saw Ireland dividing into three Peoples.  The native Irish (now including the Old English) were largely dispossessed, dispirited and incapable of posing any real military threat.  The English administration and English settlers were expanding both in numbers and in land-holdings and were emerging as the Anglo-Irish; English colonists who began to think of Ireland as 'home' but who had little in common with the native Irish.  The Scots planters were making Ulster their true home, having little affection for the crown but remaining wary and suspicious of the Irish.  From an English perspective, this potentially explosive mixture of Peoples had to be kept in as peaceful a state as possible.  The solution appeared to be to strengthen the “English in Ireland”, while reducing the Irish to a state of total impotence.  The Ulster Scots as we may now term the Scottish planters were left in limbo; neither friends nor enemies.