authority, bitter reflections on King and ministry, Dutch
favourites, French refugees, and Irish Papists. The consequence
was that only four names were subscribed to the report. The three
dissentients presented a separate memorial. As to the main facts,
however, there was little or no dispute. It appeared that more
than a million of Irish acres, or about seventeen hundred
thousand English acres, an area equal to that of Middlesex,
Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire
together, had been forfeited during the late troubles. But of the
value of this large territory very different estimates were
formed. The commissioners acknowledged that they could obtain no
certain information. In the absence of such information they
conjectured the annual rent to be about two hundred thousand
pounds, and the fee simple to be worth thirteen years' purchase,
that is to say, about two millions six hundred thousand pounds.
They seem not to have been aware that much of the land had been
let very low on perpetual leases, and that much was burdened with
mortgages. A contemporary writer, who was evidently well
acquainted with Ireland, asserted that the authors of the report
had valued the forfeited property in Carlow at six times the real
market price, and that the two million six hundred thousand
pounds, of which they talked, would be found to shrink to about
half a million, which, as the exchanges then stood between Dublin
and London, would have dwindled to four hundred thousand pounds
by the time that it reached the English Exchequer. It was
subsequently proved, beyond all dispute, that this estimate was
very much nearer the truth than that which had been formed by
Trenchard and Trenchard's colleagues.

Of the seventeen hundred thousand acres which had been forfeited,