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Richard Cromwell had succeeded his father as lord protector in September 1658. He was formally lord protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, but the arrangement depended upon the cooperation of an army whose officers distrusted civilian parliaments and resented the uncertain constitutional direction of the new regime. In Ireland, Henry Cromwell had supplied much of the practical strength that Richard lacked. He had governed with relative competence and had won the confidence of many Protestant settlers and officials, while remaining committed to the Cromwellian settlement.
The Down Survey was the year’s most durable Irish development. Directed by Sir William Petty, physician, administrator and practical innovator, it had been undertaken from 1656 and was completed in 1658. It was a vast exercise in measuring land on maps rather than merely describing it in written schedules: the first detailed survey carried out on a national scale. Its immediate purpose was not neutral knowledge. It identified land available after forfeiture so that the Commonwealth could meet commitments to Merchant Adventurers, who had financed the war, and to soldiers owed arrears of pay.
The central firmly dated development came on 8 June, when the Westminster parliament passed An Act for the Assuring, Confirming and Settling of Lands and Estates in Ireland. The long title reveals its purpose. Since the Act for the Settlement of Ireland of 1652, land had been seized, surveyed, assigned, adjudicated and re-assigned through a dense succession of ordinances, instructions and local decisions. The 1657 act confirmed those earlier proceedings. It was intended to give a more dependable legal foundation to the distribution of Irish land among creditors of parliament, army officers and soldiers, Protestant purchasers, and others whom the regime recognised as entitled to grants.
The most firmly dated business of the year concerns transplantation: the Commonwealth policy of removing many Irish Catholic proprietors and others judged liable to forfeiture from Leinster, Munster and Ulster into Connacht and County Clare. This programme had been framed in earlier legislation and orders; 1655 was not its beginning. Yet the surviving proclamations show that it was being pressed, adjusted and policed in that calendar year. On 27 February the Irish government extended the time allowed for transplantation until 20 May, expressly because heavy rains had impeded movement. The detail is revealing. Removal on paper meant travel on winter and spring roads, across rivers and through a landscape made difficult by weather, livestock, carts and the need to find somewhere to live.
The year opened with the remnants of the wars still visible in Ulster. Sir Phelim O’Neill, a leading figure in the rising of 1641, had continued resistance after the collapse of larger Catholic armies. Betrayed in Tyrone in February 1653, he was carried to Dublin before the Commonwealth’s high court of justice. The authorities offered him pardon if he would implicate the dead Charles I in the origins of the 1641 rebellion. He refused. On 10 March he was executed for his alleged part in the killings of Protestant settlers during the opening violence of the rebellion; his remains were displayed at Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk. The execution was intended both as punishment and as a political statement: the new regime would present itself as the avenger of 1641 as well as the conqueror of Ireland.
