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The most consequential administrative event began on 28 May, when enumerators started the first full census of Ireland. Earlier attempts at a national count had proved inadequate. This inquiry was markedly ambitious for its time: officers were instructed to proceed house by house, recording each resident’s name, age and occupation. Their notebooks also allowed for relationships within households, the number of storeys in a dwelling, acreage held by local landholders, and observations on schools. Soldiers in barracks, prisoners, infirmary patients, boarders at schools and visitors were, in principle, to be included. The census was therefore an attempt to turn an immensely varied society into legible local facts, townland by townland.
In 1669, Irish government changed hands, though not in a manner that promised a clean break. On 14 February Charles II announced his intention to remove James Butler, duke of Ormond, from the lord lieutenancy. Ormond had been the dominant figure in Restoration Ireland since taking office in 1662: an exceptionally well-connected Protestant magnate, a royalist survivor of the wars, and the architect of much of the practical settlement that followed them. His replacement was John, Lord Robartes, formally appointed lord lieutenant on 3 May. The transfer matters because it exposed a central fact of Restoration rule: Ireland was governed from Dublin, but decisive political calculations were made at the English court.
