Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and wreaked on their landlords, in the massacre of 1641, vengeance for a generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots, English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell repaid the massacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More than two-thirds of Irish land had now passed into the hands of Englishmen; and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet complete: the new expropriation was followed in 1689-90 by yet another attempt on the part of the Irish to recover their inheritance, and the failure of that attempt by further confiscation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century three-quarters of the land was owned by the English garrison, and the progress of the century was marked by fresh evictions. Political reasons had ceased, but economic causes supplied their place; and wide stretches of pasture were needed in order that the landlords might turn _their_ property to the most profitable grazing purposes. Only land that would not do for cattle was left to the Irish peasants; from the bogs there looked up, from the barren hills there looked down, the Roman Catholic disinherited upon the smiling meadows of their Protestant supplanters.
Upon this broadening basis of plantation was developed the Irish Parliament, a Parliament doomed from the first by the very conditions of its being to a sterile and troubled existence. Here and there from the days of Elizabeth a native name may be traced in the lists of its members, but it was almost exclusively the Parliament of a caste, the instrument of oppression. Ten counties only sent representatives to Elizabeth’s Parliament of 1560; plantation increased the number to twenty-seven in 1585; and the tale was fairly complete when, after the plantation of Ulster, James I. next summoned a Parliament in 1613. But the “Irish interest” which struggled therein against the “English interest” represented only the Anglo-Irish families, who had struck some roots in the soil and resented the dictation of English officials. The “native interest” had no voice in Parliament until O’Connell’s triumph in 1828. Hence the pitiful impotence of this Parliament, the emptiness of the sound and fury of its constitutional debates. The beneficiaries of conquest could not in logic use the armoury of consent. The dependence of the colonists upon England placed their Parliament at the mercy of the English Government. They relied upon English force to expropriate the native Irish and to proscribe the Roman Catholic religion; and this reliance deprived them of moral and material grounds of resistance to the political, commercial, and industrial tyranny of their masters. The power which gave the planters their land could laugh at their constitutional pretensions. So the Dublin Parliament idly strove to emulate its exemplar at Westminster, and clamoured in vain for responsible government, for control of the Irish Executive. In spite of its Irish Parliament, Ireland has never been given the chance of governing itself.