ising we may now turn.

Its moral causes we have already spoken of. There was, first, the
confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church revenues and
buildings to Anglican clergy--clergy, that is, who recognized the
sovreign of England as the head of the church. This double confiscation
touched the well-springs of intense animosity, the dispossessed abbots
using all the influences of their order in foreign lands to bring about
their re-installation, while the controversy as to the headship of the
church aroused all the fierce and warring passions that had been raging
on the Continent since the beginning of the sixteenth century.

There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains, whose
tribal lands had been given to others. Chief among these was the famous
house of O'Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan monarch whose
wars are thought to have brought the captive of Slemish Mountain to
Ireland. The O'Neills, like their neighbors the O'Donnells, descendants
of Domnall, had been one of the great forces of tribal strife for eighty
generations, and they now saw their lands confiscated and given over to
strangers. But they were only representatives of a feeling which was
universal; an indignant opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous
expropriation.

The head of the O'Neills had made his peace with the Tudors on the very
day Queen Elizabeth died, and the tribal lands had been guaranteed to
him in perpetuity. But within four years plots were set on foot by the
central authorities, possibly acting in good faith, to dispossess him
and the chief of the O'Donnells on a charge of treason; and in 1607
both fled to the Continent. Their example was followed by numberless
others, and the more restless and combative spirits among the tribesmen,
who preferred fighting to the tilling of their fields, entered the
continental armies in large numbers.

When the chiefs of the north fled to the Continent, their lands were
held to have reverted to the crown; and not only was the right to tax
the produce of these lands assigned to adherents of the central power,
but numbers of farmers from the Scottish lowlands, and in lesser degree
from England, were brought over and settled on the old tribal territory.
The tribesmen, with their cattle, were driven to less fertile districts,
and the valleys were tilled by the transplanted farmers of Scotland.
This was the Plantation of Ulster, of 1611,--four years after the fli