Robartes’s quiet arrival at Howth symbolises an administration focused on revenue and military efficiency, yet the article shows that fiscal management was inseparable from a Protestant property settlement and continuing religious inequality. At the same moment, Catholic archbishops were being appointed through continental networks, Protestant charitable schools were expanding, and Quakers were organising petitions against penalties. These parallel developments suggest that order meant different things to government, established institutions and marginalised communities. How far should we interpret 1669 as a period of cautious pluralisation, rather than merely a more sophisticated management of an unreconciled, confessional and proprietary settlement in Ireland?