The work of settlement was soon commenced, under the supervision of the king, privy council, committees of conference, committees of inquiry, contractors, undertakers, speculators, and commissioners names of ominous import in Ireland and so often revived there that her people can rehearse them like a catechism. "In the six counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry, Farmanagh, Cavan, and Armagh, a tract of country containing 500,000 acres, was seized upon by the king and parcelled out in lots to Undertakers."[2] The "domains" of the attainted lords were assumed to include all the lands inhabited by their clans, and so far were the king's new arrangements from respecting the rights of the ancient natives, that "the fundamental ground of this _plantation_ was the avoiding of natives and planting only with British." That this cruel policy was carried out to the letter, would seem scarcely credible. But let the authority already quoted settle that matter. "It is true," says Sir Thomas Phillips, in "Harris's Hibernia," "that after the prescribed number of freeholders and leaseholders were settled on every townland, and the rents therein set down, _they might let the remainder to natives, for lives, so as they were conformable in religion, and for the favor_ to DOUBLE THEIR RENTS!" Even so, to double their rents, if natives, though conformable in religion. A _high favor_, and all for the love of God! This is but a very imperfect outline of the plantation of Ulster, and the manner of effecting it; and it is alluded to in these pages, only in so far as it illustrates the subject-matter of them, on which that settlement has a direct bearing. Its immediate and subsequent effects on the Irish race, though the theme of many a commentator, have never been told, and never will be. Even its remoter consequence at the present day can scarcely be alluded to without opening up wounds but imperfectly healed, and memories too bitter for wholesome reflection. It renewed, by one dash of the royal pen, all the wrongs of the preceding centuries, and filled the last stronghold of the Irish race with a people inimical to their interests, and who, with the exception of one short epoch in the country's history, have remained a cancer on the body politic, and, as if by a special providence, though meant to strengthen the dynasty of the Stuarts, were mainly instrumental in causing its extinction. The reign of Charles I. was an eventful and a bloody one. In 1625 he ascended the throne; in 1649 he ascended the scaffold; and through the intervening period of twenty-four years, it was a continual struggle for the preservation of the royal prerogatives. These prerogatives were yielded, one by one, to the fanatical spirit of the age, and the last royal prerogative, that of life--for it is held a standing apothegm, that the king can do no wrong--terminated in a disastrous civil war which drenched the three kingdoms in blood.