The position of the Irish as compared with the English Puritans, was essentially different in the eyes of Ormond, Clarendon, and the other counsellors of the king. Though the former represented dissent as against the church, they also represented the English as against the Irish interest, in Ireland. As dissenters they were disliked and ridiculed, but as colonists they could not be disturbed. When national antipathy was placed in one scale and religious animosity in the other, the intensely national feeling of England for the Cromwellians, as Englishmen settled in a hostile country, prevailed over every other consideration. In this, as in all other conjunctures, it has been the singular infelicity of the one island to be subjected to a policy directly opposite to that pursued in the other. While in England it was considered wise and just to break down the Puritans as a party—through the court, the pulpit, and the press; to drive the violent into exile, and to win the lukewarm to conformity; in Ireland it was decided to confirm them in their possessions, to leave the government of the kingdom in their hands, and to strengthen their position by the Acts of Settlement and Explanation. These acts were hailed as "the Magna Charta of Irish Protestantism," but so far as the vast majority of the people were concerned, they were as cruelly unjust as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or the edicts which banished the Moors and Jews from the Spanish peninsula.
The struggle for possession of the soil inaugurated by the confiscations of Elizabeth and James was continued against great odds by the Catholic Irish throughout this reign. Though the royal declaration of Breda, which preceded the restoration, had not mentioned them expressly, they still claimed under it not only the "liberty to tender consciences," but that "just satisfaction" to those unfairly deprived of their estates, promised in that declaration. Accordingly, several of the old gentry returned from Connaught, or places abroad, took possession of their old homes, or made their way at once to Dublin or London, to urge their claims to their former estates. To their dismay, they found in Dublin, Coote and Broghill established as Lords Justices, and the new Parliament—the first that sat for twenty years—composed of an overwhelming majority of Undertakers, adventurers, and Puritan representatives of boroughs, from which all the Catholic electors had been long excluded. The Protestant interest, or "ascendancy party," as it now began to be commonly called, counted in the Commons 198 members to 64 Catholics; in the House of Lords, 72 Protestant to 21 Catholic peers. The former elected Sir Audley Mervyn their Speaker, and the able but curiously intricate and quaint discourses of the ancient colleague of Kelly and Darcy in the assertion of Irish legislative independence, shows how different was the spirit of Irish Protestantism in 1661 as compared with 1641. The Lords chose Bramhall, the long-exiled Bishop of Derry, now Archbishop of Armagh, as their Speaker, and attempted to compel their members "to take the sacrament" according to the Anglican ritual. The majority of both Houses, to secure the good-will of Ormond, voted him the sum of 30,000 pounds, and then proceeded to consider "the Bill of Settlement," in relation to landed property. The Catholic bar, which had been apparently restored to its freedom, presented a striking array of talent, from which their co-religionists selected those by whom they desired to be heard at the bar of the House. The venerable Darcy and the accomplished Belling were no longer their oracles of the law; but they had the services of Sir Nicholas Plunkett, an old confederate, of Sir Richard Nagle, author of the famous "Coventry Letter," of Nugent, afterwards Lord Riverston, and other able men. In the House of Lords they had an intrepid ally in the Earl of Kildare, and in England an agent equally intrepid, in Colonel Richard Talbot, afterwards Earl of Tyrconnell. The diplomatic and parliamentary struggle between the two interests, the disinherited and the new proprietory, was too protracted, and the details are too involved for elucidation in every part; but the result tells its own story. In 1675—in the fifteenth year of the restoration—the new settlers possessed above 4,500,000 acres, to about 2,250,000 still retained by the old owners. These relative proportions were exactly the reverse of those existing before the Cromwellian settlement; a single generation had seen this great revolution accomplished in landed property.