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On 18 January, Sir Richard Talbot petitioned Charles II on behalf of Catholic nobles and gentry. The issue was land. The Restoration settlement of the 1660s had confirmed the enormous transfer of property produced by the wars, Cromwellian conquest and transplantation. Some Catholic proprietors had recovered land through the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, but many believed the settlement had been unfairly administered or had left legitimate claims unheard. Talbot’s petition did not undo the existing order. It was, however, an organised attempt to bring the grievances of the dispossessed back before the king.
In 1640, Ireland was not yet at war within itself. The uprising usually called the Irish Rebellion would not begin until October 1641, and the Catholic Confederation belonged to the following year. Yet this was a year in which the political arrangements that had held the kingdom together began to fail visibly. Ireland’s government was drawn into Charles I’s attempt to subdue the Scottish Covenanters in the Second Bishops’ War; its parliament became an arena for arguments about taxation, law and arbitrary rule; and confidence in the administration of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, drained away. By December, the lord deputy was dead, a prominent bishop had been executed, and the authority of Dublin Castle looked markedly less secure than it had in spring.
