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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.
In January a proclamation enforced Wentworth’s tobacco monopoly. Tobacco was no longer a rare novelty: it had become a widely consumed imported commodity, and therefore an attractive object of state control. The monopoly did not simply regulate what could be sold. It channelled a familiar article of everyday consumption through a licensing and customs system from which the deputy expected both crown revenue and private advantage. Tobacco merchants, retailers and consumers encountered the state not as an abstraction but in prices, permits, seizures and the restricted legal supply of a desired good.
