Smock Alley and the Claims
The Act of Settlement was the central Irish development of 1662. Its full title promised the “better execution” of the king’s earlier declaration for settling Ireland and satisfying adventurers, soldiers and other subjects. That language concealed a problem which no formula could neatly resolve. Adventurers who had financed the parliamentary war, officers and soldiers paid in confiscated land, Protestant landowners dispossessed during the 1641 rebellion, royalists, and Catholic proprietors who claimed both loyalty and innocence all advanced titles that overlapped. The land available could not meet every obligation.