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The immediate business of government was implementing the surrender terms agreed at Limerick on 3 October 1691. On 24 February 1692 William and Mary ratified the civil and military articles by letters patent under the Great Seal of England. This was a significant guarantee, but not a simple declaration of general toleration. The civil articles named particular groups—inhabitants of Limerick and other Jacobite garrisons, officers and soldiers, and people in specified western and southern counties—who submitted to the new sovereigns. Within their stated conditions, they were promised the estates, rights and privileges they had lawfully possessed under Charles II, and relief from specified arrears accumulated since Michaelmas 1688.
Tyrconnell’s appointment as lord deputy was recorded on 8 January 1687, replacing the Protestant lord lieutenant, Henry Hyde, second earl of Clarendon. He was sworn into office in February. The distinction mattered: Tyrconnell held the practical powers of chief governor but the deliberately lesser title of lord deputy signalled James II’s caution. The king wanted Catholic advancement, but did not wish to provoke Protestant subjects unnecessarily or to commit himself immediately to a wholesale revision of the land settlement.
The succession did not itself repeal any Irish law, redistribute an acre, or overturn the established church. Nor should the year be read backwards from the Williamite war which began in 1689. In 1685 James’s authority was recognised across the island, and the administrative machinery built under his brother remained functioning. The duke of Ormond’s long influence over Irish government still framed the political world in which landlords, bishops, judges, merchants and county gentry operated. But confidence in continuity was weakened by the identity of the new monarch and by the men closest to him.
The most pressing date was 1 May 1654. Under the Commonwealth settlement, persons judged liable to transplantation were required to remove themselves, their families, dependants, livestock and movable goods to Connacht or County Clare by then. The policy was rooted in the Act for the Settlement of Ireland of August 1652 and instructions issued during 1653; it was not an order born suddenly in 1654. Yet the arrival of the deadline made its implications acute in communities across Leinster, Munster and Ulster. Catholic proprietors and others classed by the regime as transplantable faced the prospect of abandoning inherited estates east of the Shannon for allotted land in the designated western zone.
