Names of the Cromwellian Adventurers for Land in Ireland in the 17th Century

“According to the scheme of the Parliament for suppressing the Irish Rebellion (of 1641), 2,500,000 acres of Irish lands, to be forfeited, were offered as security to those who should advance moneys towards raising and paying a private army for subduing the rebels in Ireland. The moneys, instead of being paid into the King’s exchequer, were to be paid to a committee, composed half of members of the House of Commons, and half of subscribers to this joint fund, who were to nominate the general and the officers, the king having nothing to say to the force but to sign the officers’ commissions. All the Irish saw that this army of Adventurers were coming, like the first invaders under Strongbow, to conquer estates for themselves and their employers, and therefore could not but oppose them for the sake of their wives and children, who must be deprived of their homes. They must therefore fight against England, thus represented, and the King (Charles I.) be deprived of their aid. The King objected to the Act: it took away from him the power of pardoning the Irish; and he suggested that it must only render them desperate, which in truth was the very purpose of the Parliament, but he dared not refuse his assent. The measure was received in England as a triumph over the king and the Irish. The subscribers, or Adventurers, as they were called, were to have estates and manors of one thousand acres given to them in Ireland at the following low rates:—In Ulster for £200, in Connaught for £300, in Munster for £450, and in Leinster for £600, and lands proportionately for less sums. The rates by the acre were four shillings in Ulster, six shillings in Connaught, eight shillings in Munster, and twelve shillings in Leinster. If this plan were carried out, it was to put an end for ever, according to Sir John Bulstrode Whitelock, the Speaker of the HouSe of Commons, to that long and bloody conflict foretold (with so much truth) by Giraldus Cambrensis … The work of Queen Elizabeth and James the First, it was said, would now be perfected. The Irish would be rooted out by a new and overwhelming plantation of English: another England would speedily be found in Ireland; and that prophecy (by Giraldus Cambrensis), as old as the invasion, be proved false, that Ireland will not be conquered till just before the Day of Judgment.”