Charles II
prejudiced writer, "in the great rebellion lost their estates for fighting in defence of their King; the schismatics, who cut off the father's head, forced the son to fly for his life, and overturned the whole ancient frame of government, religious and civil, obtained grants of those very estates which the Catholics lost in defence of the ancient constitution, many of which estates are at this day possessed by the posterity of those schismatics; and thus they gained by their rebellion what the Catholics lost by their loyalty."36
From the agrarian quarrel between the two races who then dwelt in Ireland, we pass by a natural transition to consider the relative positions of their respective churches. If we may accept the estimate of the foremost statistician of that age, the total population of Ireland in the reign of Charles the Second amounted to about 1,100,000.37 At least 800,000 of these, descended, some of them from the aboriginal Celts, some of them from the earliest English colonists, professed the Roman Catholic religion and were contemptuously classed together as "Irishry." The remaining 300,000 were Protestant colonists, for the most part recently settled in the country. According to Petty, these colonists, who were known under the generic name of
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