We may imagine the dismay and anguish which this announcement caused.  The old Irish chieftain and the Anglo-Irish lord still had some kind of home and shelter on their own estate—­it might be but an outhouse or a barn; it was certainly on the worst and least cultivated portion of their land, for the old castle had long since been taken from them, and their broad acres transferred to others.  Yet, though they tilled the soil of which they so lately had been the lords, this little spot was home:  there the wife and mother loved her little ones as tenderly as in the stately halls which her husband or his fathers had so lately possessed.  It was home, and if not the dear old home, it was, perhaps, loved all the more for its sorrowful proximity to the ancestral castle—­for the faint hope that the rightful owner might still be restored.  But the trumpet had sounded the nation’s doom.  Confiscation and banishment, wholesale plunder and untold iniquity, reigned supreme.  The name of the God of justice was invoked to sanction[492] the grossest outrages upon justice; and men who professed to have freed their own nation from the tyranny of kingcraft and of Popery, perpetrated a tyranny on another nation, which has made the name of their leader a byword and a curse.

The majority of the Catholic nobility and gentry were banished; the remainder of the nation, thus more than decimated, were sent to Connaught.  On the 26th of September, 1653, all the property of the Irish people was declared to belong to the English army and adventurers, “and it was announced that the Parliament had assigned Connaught [America was not then accessible] for the habitation of the Irish nation, whither they must transplant, with their wives, and daughters, and children, before 1st May following, under the penalty of death, if found on this side of the Shannon after that day."[493] It must not be supposed that this death penalty was a mere threat; I shall give instances to prove the contrary.  Any man, woman, or child who had disobeyed this order, no matter from what cause, could be instantly executed in any way, by any of these soldiers or adventurers, without judge, jury, or trial.  It was in fact constituting a special commission for the new comers to murder[494] all the old inhabitants.

Connaught was selected for two reasons:  first, because it was the most wasted province of Ireland; and secondly, because it could be, and in fact was, most easily converted into a national prison, by erecting a cordon militaire across the country, from sea to sea.  To make the imprisonment more complete, a belt four miles wide, commencing one mile to the west of Sligo, and thence running along the coast and the Shannon, was to be given to the soldiery to plant.  Thus, any Irishman who attempted to escape, would be sure of instant capture and execution.