Parliament was dismissed for thirteen years, Henry, in fact, had exactly fulfilled the project of mystification he proposed twenty years before--"to be politically and secretly handled." Every trace of Irish law and land tenure must finally be abolished so that the soil should lie at the king's will alone, but this was to be done at first by secret and politic measures, here a little and there a little, so that, as he said, the Irish lords should as yet conceive no suspicion that they were to be "constrained to live under our law or put from all the lands by them now detained." "Politic practices," said Henry, would serve till such time as the strength of the Irish should be diminished, their leaders taken from them, and division put among themselves so that they join not together. If there had been any truth or consideration for Ireland in the royal compact some hope of compromise and conciliation might have opened. But the whole scheme was rooted and grounded in falsehood, and Ireland had yet to learn how far sufferings by the quibbles and devices of law might exceed the disasters of open war. Chiefs could be ensnared one by one in misleading contracts, practically void. A false claimant could be put on a territory and supported by English soldiers in a civil war, till the actual chief was exiled or yielded the land to the king's ownership. No chief, true or false, had power to give away the people's land, and the king was face to face with an indignant people, who refused to admit an illegal bargain. Then came a march of soldiers over the district, hanging, burning, shooting "the rebels," casting the peasants out on the hillsides. There was also the way of "conquest." The whole of the inhabitants were to be exiled, and the countries made vacant and waste for English peopling: the sovereign's rule would be immediate and peremptory over those whom he had thus planted by his sole will, and Ireland would be kept subject in a way unknown in England; then "the king might say Ireland was clearly won, and after that he would be at little cost and receive great profits, and men and money at pleasure." There would be no such difficulty, Henry's advisers said as those of Henry II had said before, to "subdue or exile them as hath been thought," for from the settled lands plantation could be spread into the surrounding territories, and the Irishry steadily pushed back into the sea. Henceforth it became a fixed policy to "exterminate and exile the country people of the Irishry." Whether they submitted or not, the king was to "inhabit their country" with English blood. But again as in the twelfth century it was the king and the metropolis that were to profit, not any class of inhabitants of Ireland.