PREFACE THE documents printed in these two volumes form part of a collection I made many years ago, when I had it in mind to write a history of the Commonwealth in Ireland. That intention was never realised for several reasons but chiefly because I felt that the knowledge I possessed of Irish history was insuficient to enable me to deal with the subject adequately. At the time I was of opinion that the view taken by Prendergast in his well-known book-The Commonwealth Settlement of Irelad -was not an entirely impartial one. I thought it possible to present the Crornwellian policy in a more favourable light than either he or Carte, with his royalist predilections, had done. My position was that taken up by Cromwell himself that the conquest and confiscation of Ireland was the divine retribution for the horrid and unprovoked massacre by the Irish Catholics of the English and Scottish settlers in Ireland in the first year of the Rebellion. In this spirit I made these transcripts, and nothing that I read in them tended to alter Chat view. From the Records of the Commonwealth I turned to a study of the Depositions relating to the Massacres. It was then that I first began to experience an uncomfortable feeling that my evidence was not so strong as I would have liked it to be. True the Depositions were very explicit and apparently incontrovertible but I was living in Dublin at a time when the power of the Land League was at its height, and I could not help asking what value depositions taken by a body of Orange magistrates as tonationalist outrages were likely to possess for an impartial estimate of the state of Ireland during the government of Earl Spencer. Was the state of affairs in 1642 more favourable for an impartial inquiry than it was in 1882 Were the seven dispossessed clergymen of the Established Church, with Dr Henry Jones for whom I had ceased to feel much respect at their had, more likely to measure out equal justice to Catholic insurgents than a commission composed entirely of Orange magistrates to Catholic nationaIists If not, what value could these Depositions have for the historian It was not, however, this doubt alone, which led me to throw over the Depositions as historical evidence, but the fact that had come to light during my study of the period, that it was not on them that the confiscation of the land of Ireland by the Long Parliament was based. Considering all the talk about the Depositions as evidence, it was startling enough to find that, so far as I could gather, the Long Parliament had no cognisance of their existence. In the circumstances the only conclusion I could come to was that the Rebellion in itself was regarded by the Long Parliament as a sufficient ground for the sale of Ireland. The question then arose-if the Rebellion and Cromwellian Settlement were to be regarded in the Iight of cause and effect, to what cause or set of causes-i.e. grievances for grievances I supposed there must have been-was the Rebellion itself due Here I was confronted by two views the one represented by Temple, Borlase, Hume and the older school of historians attributing the Rebellion to Roman Catholic intrigues the other represented by the late Dr Gardiner, who seemed inclined to regard the indignation aroused by the agrarian policy pursued by Elizabeth and James I. as the real cause of the Rebellion...